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by briangibson22

The Nixon administration, King Corn, Saturday morning cartoons, and The Great Gilly Hopkins? Huh?!?

One [legacy of Watergate] is a lingering skepticism of institutions and the individuals who head them, contempt for authority figures, distrust of the influence of money in politics, and deep doubts of the schoolboy verities of the civics class, especially the twin notions that nobility resides in government and that noble principles animate those who govern us.

—David Shribman, “Watergate left North America a different place” (2012)

As the United States entered the 1970s, the decade of its bicentennial, the country was embroiled in the Vietnam War and led by Richard Milhous Nixon, who had got into the White House, in 1968, on a margin of just 31 electoral votes. Then, in the 1972 election, Nixon won all but 18 electoral votes, nabbing the greatest share of the popular vote for a Republican and scoring the fifth-greatest margin of victory ever. Just two years later, Nixon announced military withdrawal from Vietnam—concluding a shameful, war crimes-riddled, failed effort to thwart Communist rule—and then, facing impeachment for Watergate, Nixon resigned, his name (and the sneering nickname “Tricky Dicky”) synonymous with presidential corruption, deceit, and disgrace.

And then, in 1978, came The Great Gilly Hopkins.

Harriet Barton’s cover of the second edition

Katherine Paterson’s gritty novel concerns an 11-year-old girl in (fictional) Thompson Park, on the sprawling-into-Maryland outskirts of Washington, D.C. There, in September 1976, Galadriel “Gilly” Hopkins, fancying herself too feisty and smart to handle, finds herself placed with a new foster mom, Maimie Trotter, and her other charge, little W. E. (William Ernest) Teague.

Gilly, who tries to build herself up by looking down and lashing out, sneers at her new guardian’s size, wanting to see her as a trotter (she even thinks of her, nastily, as “lard face”). What Gilly—who wants to see herself as better than others, with a white birth mother she refers to by her full WASP name, Courtney Rutherford Hopkins—doesn’t want to admit to is why Trotter may be overweight: poverty. It’s why Gilly gets a “free lunch” at school and, when she gets home, chocolate chip cookies for a snack. Poor Americans can’t often afford to eat well, and nutrient-poor food, as in Trotter’s house, is often cheapest and easiest to buy and make. But it was in The Great Gilly Hopkins’ decade that so much American food became poorer, cheapened by corn, because of an even whiter house just minutes’ drive away.

The government-pushed glut began in 1973, when the Nixon administration’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, set out the Farm Bill, seeding the way for a government-subsidy program for corn producers. That led, by the cracked logic of the free market, to tons upon tons of cheap, surplus corn that’s made its way into about a quarter of American food, mostly as a cheap, empty-calorie sugar substitute. The documentary King Corn (2007) has chalk-outlined the results: sharp increases in obesity and diabetes, and a drop in lifespan.

(King Corn offers plenty more harsh, unnatural truths: 1. Corn isn’t really grown—in eighteen minutes, a machine can seed an Iowa acreage with corn altered to tolerate growing so close together, increasing the farm’s yield, the plot can be sprayed with weed-killing “Liberty” herbicide [which the corn’s been made resistant to], and a farmer then waits until it’s harvest time. 2. It’s hardly corn, but an inedible, genetically-modified, nutrition-depleted version of the dominant Yellow Dent strain. 3. It’s not just nutrient-starved but unnaturally abundant and dangerous—cattle can be fattened with so much so quickly that they develop acidosis, so the corn has to be laced with antibiotics before it’s fed to what becomes American beef. 4. It’s usually not coming to us as corn, but as corn-fed beef or corn syrup-sweetened soda. And, as Elizabeth Kolbert and others have noted, in the U.S., corn’s converted into billions of gallons of ethanol blended into gasoline, as government-mandated, and that shift of corn from groceries to gas raises commodity prices, leading farmers to turn more marshes and woods into cropland, increasing C02.)

Little surprise, then, that, through the ’70s and into the ’80s, cornier or corn-syrupier, more sugary cereals (Cap’n Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, Corn Crackos, Corny Snaps, Freakies, Frosty O’s, Honey Smacks, Sugar Pops, and other boxed-up brands on supermarket shelves), some offering toys inside, were eaten, more and more, by American kids saucer-eyeing Saturday morning cartoons: Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, Grape Ape, Bullwinkle, Scooby-Doo, Pink Panther, Speed Buggy, Jetsons, Fat Albert, and other antic animations boxed-up on the small screen. Although there’s no mention of Saturday morning cartoon-watching in Paterson’s novel (still, Agnes does smile like a “cartoon cat” at Gilly in the school cafeteria), Gilly is a very TV-aware tween, thinking little of Trotter’s antennaed black-and-white set or, at first, the educational shows, like Sesame Street, that W. E. watches on it. And the girl’s notion that hitchhikers are always being killed, her imagined mobster nicknames for W. E., her sense of her black teacher, Miss Harris, as the computer HAL gone haywire, and her impersonation of a Bogart tough show her film influences.

It’s the small screen that gives Gilly her crowning idea—a prank sure to show her as both unmanageable and too clever for her, or anyone’s, good:

It was TV that gave her the clue. . . . somehow [the news broadcast] began sending a message into her brain. A high government official had told a joke on an airplane that had gotten him fired. Not just any joke, mind you. A dirty joke. But that wasn’t what got him fired. The dirty joke had been somehow insulting to blacks. . . . She now knew something that might be a key to Harris-6.

That “high government official”? Earl Butz. The “joke” he told on a commercial flight was reported to Time and Rolling Stone, another magazine figured out who said it, and the story broke from there. But Butz’s joke was utterly reflective of his previous boss (and the administration?), because Nixon’s vile racism came out on Oval Office tapes released fifteen years after his death, including the comment, just after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, that abortion is sometimes necessary, as in cases of black-and-white couples having children.

It’s this anti-miscegenation (race-mixing) stigma—which ran especially deep in the American South, though countless slaveowners ignored it when personally convenient—that Gilly unthinkingly continues when she’s asked by Trotter to help bring the neighbour, blind Mr. Randolph, over for dinner, and Gilly, finding the man to be black, is scared by him, running back to Trotter and saying, “‘I never touched one of those people in my life.’”

So, when racism trickles down again from the Nixon administration via the news, Gilly’s brainwave about (mis)harassing Miss Harris leads her to craft a card with a picture of a black woman from a magazine on the front, and she writes:

THEY’RE SAYING “BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL!”

Then below the picture:

BUT THE BEST THAT I CAN FIGGER

IS EVERYONE WHO’S SAYING SO

LOOKS MIGHTY LIKE A

And inside in tiny letters:

PERSON WITH A VESTED INTEREST IN

MAINTAINING THIS POINT OF VIEW.

Thus Gilly Hopkins racially insults the teacher who, on her first day in Grade 6, revealed to our hero the truth of her name: “‘Galadriel Hopkins. What a beautiful name! From Tolkien, of course.’”

But it is, slowly but surely, in reading, not TV, and in letting herself be taught by those she wanted to see as Other, as Lesser, that Gilly finds and develops her empathy and understanding, leaving her bigotry behind. Miss Harris doesn’t visibly react to the card but later, in private, tells Gilly that they are much more similar than she thinks—they both struggle with anger—and, even after she must leave Thompson Park behind, Gilly corresponds with Miss Harris, who sends her The Lord of the Rings, which she starts to devour. As for Mr. Randolph, he has Gilly read a poem from his Oxford Book of English Verse, and Gilly becomes privately enraptured, too, by it—Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Poetry leads the child to begin, steadily and surely, to harmonize with a man she had wanted to disdain.

But Gilly is a Nixon-era kid: soon after arriving at Trotter’s, she “flashed her crooked-politician smile” at W. E.; when she’s so set on stealing the money in Mr. Randolph’s bookcase to buy a bus ticket to get to her birth mom and has to endure what’s on TV, she “jiggled her foot through . . . the bribery trial of a congressman from who cared where”; she justifies conning Trotter and Mr. Randolph by thinking that “People were so dumb sometimes you almost felt bad to take advantage of them—but not too bad. Not when it was your only way to get where you had to go.”

And Gilly’s dream—reuniting with Courtney—is an American delusion. She props it up with a false belief in good, clean, upstanding whiteness—“families like Courtney’s did not eat with colored people”, she thinks—but soon unlearns her prejudice through experience, care (caring for Mr. Randolph when he, Trotter, and W. E. fall ill before Thanksgiving), and reading. Then she gets the harshest lesson of all, when Courtney arrives for only two days, paid to come by her mother. She still doesn’t want blonde (and blue-eyed?) Gilly.

So, that’s when a tearful Gilly calls Trotter, who consoles the girl with her soothing voice, “I love you”s, and hard truths, including one about white entitlement: “‘you just fool yourself if you expect good things all the time. They ain’t what’s regular—don’t nobody owe ’em to you.’” In 1976, the bicentennial of America’s independence, with the country still contending with counterculture movements, as the stain of the Vietnam War spread, and after Watergate had sparked “a lingering skepticism of institutions and the individuals who head them, contempt for authority figures, [and] distrust of the influence of money in politics”, the great Gilly Hopkins’ lesson about white entitlement, a lesson in “the pursuit of happiness”—that constant struggle for the betterment of civil society—was one that white America was only just starting to learn.

Works Cited and Consulted

Paterson, Katherine. The Great Gilly Hopkins. 1978. Revised ed., Harper Trophy, 2004.

King Corn. Directed by Aaron Wolf, Balcony, 2007.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. “Do We Need Another Green Revolution?” The New Yorker, 23 June 2025, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/30/do-we-need-another-green-revolution.

Shribman, David. “Watergate left North America a different place.” The Globe and Mail, 16 June 2012.

The author, a professor of literature, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All images are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.

by briangibson22

Why is Pooh’s friend Rabbit a xenophobe (and not really much of a friend)?

Chapter VII of Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) offers one of the most sanitized titles in children’s literature: “In Which Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest, and Piglet Has a Bath”. It’s a cover-up, not a clean-up. For honesty’s sake, it should be: “In Which Rabbit Devises and Carries Out a Plan to Rid the Forest of Kanga and Roo (But They Stay).” Because this is the chapter where Rabbit enlists Pooh and Piglet in abducting a baby, to force his mother out of their neighbourhood.

And just how, exactly, does A. A. Milne’s classic seem to anticipate, six years later, the Lindbergh kidnapping case? Well, Rabbit comes up with an elaborate, eleven-point “PLAN TO CAPTURE BABY ROO” (only three of its points are actually needed, to wit: a chatty Pooh distracts Kanga; Roo and Piglet are switched, with Piglet put in Kanga’s “pocket”; Rabbit runs off with Roo while Kanga is still distracted).

Rabbit writing up his plan to kidnap Roo

But why this deception, baby-napping, and fearmongering? It all begins when, with Pooh and Piglet talking to their cunicular pal about the marsupial newcomers to their Forest, Rabbit says, “‘What I don’t like about it is this. Here we are . . . and then, suddenly, we wake up one morning and, what do we find? We find a Strange Animal among us. An animal of whom we have never even heard before! An animal who carries her family about with her in her pocket!’” And this is how we realize that Rabbit is a xenophobe. (The hare-brained plotter’s suspicion and dislike of the Other seems especially unwarranted given that he has many versions of Self at hand—his close relations in the Forest are so numerous that Rabbit is unsure how many pockets he would need for family [“‘Seventeen, isn’t it?’”] and all his friends-and-relations make up most of the “Expotition” to find the North Pole.)

It may be that Rabbit is envious of the larger, rabbit-like Kanga having a pouch (“Suppose I carried my family about with me in my pocket”) and being a quicker hopper than he is (his plan begins: “1. General Remarks. Kanga runs faster than any of Us, even Me”). But, whatever the reason, he certainly puts the small(minded) into bigotry, deciding lickety-split on the best course of action: “‘What are we to do about Kanga? . . . The best way would be to steal Baby Roo and hide him, and then when Kanga says, “Where’s Baby Roo?” we say, “Aha!” . . . “Aha!” means “We’ll tell you where Baby Roo is, if you promise to go away from the Forest and never come back.”’” So, in his kidnapping scheme to achieve the Forced Exile of the Strange Animal(s), Rabbit, all anti-immigration but still with some heart, sees no need for a ransom note or proof-of-hostage—his demand, in the form of emotional blackmail, can be delivered in person.

The switcheroo is complete

And Rabbit’s accomplices? They’re playing follow-the-leader: timid little Piglet is concerned that Kanga is “‘One of the Fiercer Animals’”, Pooh gets caught up in trying to say “Aha!” ever so meaningfully, and both become preoccupied with how useful they will be to Rabbit, who is, clearly, the Ringleader, soon reading his plan to his two helpers, “listening very eagerly with their mouths open”. (If E. H. Shepard had illustrated that scene, it would have been near-impossible not to read it as political satire of unthinking party loyalists or a kleptocrat’s lackeys.)

Besides, Rabbit’s plan fails. Once Kanga realizes who was slipped into her pocket, she isn’t worried because she knows that Christopher Robin will set all to rights. (It’s poor little Piglet, unfairly, who bears the brunt of Rabbit’s nefarious scheme—Kanga goes along with the pretense that Piglet is Roo, and gives him mouthfuls of washcloth and soap and medicine before bed, only for Christopher Robin to come and join in on the joke; Piglet flees.) In the end, identities are reasserted, relationships repaired, and new pal-pairs established for Twosdays: “So Kanga and Roo stayed in the Forest. And every Tuesday Roo spent the day with his great friend Rabbit, and every Tuesday Kanga spent the day with her great friend Pooh, teaching him to jump, and every Tuesday Piglet spent the day with his great friend Christopher Robin. So they were all happy again.”

So, then, the child reader could see Rabbit’s xenophobia as a warning—don’t be petty or prejudiced against the new kid (in your family/at school/in your neighbourhood)! After all, once the bewhiskered, scut-tailed abductor takes his tot-target home, he takes to him: “Rabbit was playing with Baby Roo in his own house, and feeling more fond of him every minute”. So, learn to accept and welcome a “Strange Other”—soon they will no longer be strange nor seem so other!

But what if Rabbit himself is the warning? What if he’s a Bad Friend?

Rabbit, who is first shown as a misanthrope (before extending his dislike of local others to hoppier immigrants), repeatedly blurs the line between making someone feel useful and using them. We first meet him by visiting his hidey-hole with Pooh—he asks, “‘Is anybody at home?’”, Rabbit answers “‘Nobody’”, changes his voice to pretend it isn’t him, next says he is visiting Pooh, and then, when he sees that it is Pooh, declares, “‘One can’t have anybody coming into one’s house. One has to be careful.’” (Rabbit repeats this it’s-not-me charade when Pooh meets him, face-to-face, to tell him about the Expotition! And at the party to celebrate Pooh’s discovery of the Pole, glum old Eeyore notes that it was “‘last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said “Bother!”’”) After Pooh partakes of too much condensed milk and honey, and gets stuck in Rabbit’s front door, Rabbit uses his back legs to hang his towels and then his laundry on. And, for Rabbit’s Roo-napping plot, he plays up how “‘Useful’” Piglet and Pooh will be, though Piglet’s use is based on his size-and-shape resemblance to Roo, and Rabbit still directs Pooh to natter on and then verbally distracts Kanga, too, as if he doesn’t trust the bear to fulfill his role in the plan.

Rabbit makes use of Pooh, overstaying his welcome

Rabbit’s bad friend-ness is made all the more obvious by Pooh being a considerate, thoughtful friend. When he becomes stuck in Rabbit’s front door, the bear, slightly sorrowful, tells Christopher Robin that he’s worried “‘that Rabbit might never be able to use his front door again. And I should hate that’”.  And Pooh, like Piglet, involves himself in Operation KangaRoomoval only to help out his friend, that is, to feel useful: “[Piglet] could hardly sit still, he was so eager to begin being useful at once. . . . ‘What about me?’ said Pooh. ‘I suppose I shan’t be useful?’” (Rabbit both assuages and entices him: “‘Without Pooh . . . the adventure would be impossible.’”)

Why, especially with his many relations and so much family, whom he seems to feel more comfortable around, not to mention Christopher Robin (Rabbit’s given pride-of-place at the head of the Expotition alongside the boy, who confides in Rabbit that he’s not sure what the North Pole looks like), does Rabbit have any non-related animals as friends? It seems that he’s learned, grudgingly, to put up with his neighbours (when he can’t put them off with pretending-to-not-be-himself) and then to make convenient use of them: as towel-horses, or accomplices. The other animals, especially kind-hearted Pooh and eager-to-be-seen Piglet, take this for friendship . . . but the reader doesn’t have to. And so, in Winnie-the-Pooh, much as Owl isn’t really a character but a caricature of the pompous intellectual, Rabbit isn’t really a character but an object-lesson in overcoming prejudice and a warning (a Cautionary Tail?) to the young child about False Friends.

Works Cited

Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh. Illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. 1926.

The author, a professor of literature, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All images are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.

by briangibson22

Just how racist is Peter and Wendy, anyway?

In J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911), as Wendy and her brothers, Darlings all, fly to Neverland with Peter and Tinkerbell, on their approach, we hear a “rasping sound that might have been the branches of trees rubbing together”, but, Peter explains, is “the redskins sharpening their knives”. Soon, the author-narrator shows them, “stealing noiselessly down the war path” on the island as they pursue Hook and his pirates:

redskins, every one of them with his eyes peeled. They carry tomahawks and knives, and their naked bodies gleam with paint and oil. Strung around them are scalps, of boys as well as of pirates, for these are the Piccaninny tribe, and not to be confused with the softer-hearted Delawares or the Hurons. In the van, on all fours, is Great Big Little Panther, a brave of so many scalps that in his present position they somewhat impede his progress. Bringing up the rear, the place of greatest danger, comes Tiger Lily, proudly erect, a princess in her own right. She is the most beautiful of dusky Dianas and the belle of the Piccaninnies, coquettish, cold and amorous by turns; there is not a brave who would not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a hatchet. Observe how they pass over fallen twigs without making the slightest noise.

Observe, indeed. And we have to ask, then, just how racist is Peter and Wendy?

On this title-page illustration for the 1911 edition, by F. D. Bedford, hatchet-holding Tiger Lily is equal to the hook-handed pirate captain

Well, for all it tries to be playful about it, plenty. Beyond all the adventure and performativity in Neverland—some of the island’s groups are reflective, in small part, of the Llewellyn Davies boys (whom Barrie befriended before becoming their guardian) playing roles and games—and the author-narrator’s stabs at humour (with Peter gone, the tribe has fed for six days and are “all a little fat”), the Indians (called “redskin” or “redskins” 35 times) are stereotypically chalk-outlined. They are first shown as: natural and primal (naked, on all fours, making no sound as if moving snakelike); savage warriors (scalping); boasting one noble, mythic, non-white beauty (the Pocahontas-like Tiger Lily is a “dusky Diana” [the warrior-goddess]).

Gwynedd M. Hudson’s cave painting-like tableau of the tribe in Peter Pan and Wendy (1931)

Odder still and even more cringingly, Barrie’s narrator mixes in a farrago of references to pseudo-racialized Others. The tribe is the “Piccaninny,” mainly a term for a black child that was already, by the 1910s, dated and offensive, especially if used by whites (and not just in the U.S. but in the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand). The author-narrator has Tiger Lily speak Chinee English: “‘Me Tiger Lily,’ that lovely creature would reply. ‘Peter Pan save me, me his velly nice friend. Me no let pirates hurt him.’”

But Barrie’s narrator also seems to want to point out and have fun with the stereotypical white-Indian dynamic. He notes that Tiger Lily is “cringing” in her pledge to Peter and that he acts condescending and is happily flattered by the tribe calling him “the Great White Father” and “prostrating themselves before him”, yet the author-narrator basically endorses the idolizing of Peter (cocky though he is). The lost boys, though looked down on by the Indians, play at being Indians. And Wendy’s “private opinion was that the redskins should not call her a squaw” (as if calling a white girl a “squaw” lessens the slur or Wendy should be exempt from stereotypes or another culture seeing her on their terms). The author-narrator acts self-aware about his offensiveness layer-cake so that we can happily eat it, too. He even offers a trying-to-be-funny pseudo-history of white-Indian warfare, but its failures and lapses (italicized by me for emphasis) are obvious:

The pirate attack had been a complete surprise . . . to surprise redskins fairly is beyond the wit of the white man.

By all the unwritten laws of savage warfare it is always the redskin who attacks, and with the wiliness of his race he does it just before the dawn, at which time he knows the courage of the whites to be at its lowest ebb. . . . Through the long black night the savage scouts wriggle, snake-like, among the grass without stirring a blade. The brushwood closes behind them as silently as sand into which a mole has dived. Not a sound is to be heard, save when they give vent to a wonderful imitation of the lonely call of the coyote. The cry is answered by other braves; and some of them do it even better than the coyotes, who are not very good at it. . . .

. . .

The Piccaninnies, on their part, trusted implicitly to [Hook’s] honour, and their whole action of the night stands out in marked contrast to his. They left nothing undone that was consistent with the reputation of their tribe. With that alertness of the senses which is at once the marvel and despair of civilised peoples, they knew that the pirates were on the island from the moment one of them trod on a dry stick; and in an incredibly short space of time the coyote cries began. . . . Everything being thus mapped out with almost diabolical cunning, the main body of the redskins folded their blankets around them, and in the phlegmatic manner that is to them the pearl of manhood squatted above the children’s home, awaiting the cold moment when they should deal pale death.

Here dreaming, though wide-awake, of the exquisite tortures to which they were to put him at break of day, those confiding savages were found by the treacherous Hook. . . .

Around the brave Tiger Lily were a dozen of her stoutest warriors, and they suddenly saw the perfidious pirates bearing down upon them. Fell from their eyes then the film through which they had looked at victory. No more would they torture at the stake. For them the happy hunting-grounds now. They knew it; but as their fathers’ sons they acquitted themselves. Even then they had time to gather in a phalanx that would have been hard to break had they risen quickly, but this they were forbidden to do by the traditions of their race. It is written that the noble savage must never express surprise in the presence of the white. Thus terrible as the sudden appearance of the pirates must have been to them, they remained stationary for a moment, not a muscle moving; as if the foe had come by invitation. Then, indeed, the tradition gallantly upheld, they seized their weapons, and the air was torn with the warcry [sic]; but it was now too late.

It is no part of ours to describe what was a massacre rather than a fight. Thus perished many of the flower of the Piccaninny tribe.

So, the author-narrator indulges in a faux-documenting, faux-mythologizing, grandly romantic little History of Hook’s Ambush which endorses condescending-to-Indian adventures. The “redskin” is racially essentialized (e.g., snake-like and innately sneaky). The tribe is too naïve and foolish, undone by their innate (but noble) faith and trust in humanity, and bound to the “tradition of their race”. They are destined to die as doomed, brave warriors, a trope then widespread, with Native Americans seen as stoical and honourable in their extermination, to make the conquerors feel better—they fought a good fight! (though the fight is barely described; the lost boys’ battle with the pirates is detailed much more). The passage is replete with references to the “noble savage” as more natural and primal than animals, while acting self-conscious about it, as if that lets the author-narrator off the hook. But all of it, like so much in Peter and Wendy, is both overdone and undercooked, not-that-funny and trying-too-hard. It is, like so much of the narrative voice in the novel, a bizarre disaster, largely uninteresting for children and frustratingly, fascinatingly bad for adults.

This is an author-narrator, after all, who spinningly turns on his own characters; he says “I despise” Wendy’s mother, calls children “heartless” more than once, is confusing in his use of “we” while acting infantile and petulant (“That is all we are, lookers-on. Nobody really want us.”), envies Peter and, it seems, children, talks over the child reader’s head (even trying to make a joke about the pluperfect!), and offers coyly sexual innuendo about Wendy, Tinkerbell, and Tiger Lily.

Wendy tells Peter and the lost boys a story while they are guarded, above ground, by their new friends, the “redskins”, listening, crouching, and stretched out (illustration by F. D. Bedford)

So often, the author-narrator seems to be trying to draw attention to himself—as if competing with cocky Peter—and his main mode is, as the critic Barbara Wall has noted, “teasing”. The author-narrator’s racism is as cringing, flippant, and self-indulgent as his tone and voice so often are throughout Peter and Wendy. In trying so hard to be the true Great White Father of the text, he only reveals how pathetically he fails . . . and his failure has echoed on through the years.

Disney picked up the racism and ran off in a different direction with it in Peter Pan (1953), featuring the song “What Makes The Red Man Red?”, with its Borscht-Belt comic edutainment about the “Injun” as childlike, henpecked, and easily embarrassed: “Once the Injun didn’t know / All the things that he know now / But the Injun, he sure learn a lot / And it’s all from asking, ‘How?’”; “In the Injun book it say / When the first brave married squaw / He gave out with a big ugh / When he saw his Mother-in-Law”; “What made the red man red? / Let’s go back a million years / To the very first Injun prince / He kissed a maid and started to blush / And we’ve all been blushin’ since”. Perry Nodelman has noted the many, many depictions and illustrations of Neverland’s Indians in plays, film adaptations, books, and comic books, including the frequent rendering of Tiger Lily as a notably busty, lighter-skinned object of lust for Peter and the reader. Nodelman decides that “the least dangerous depictions of aboriginals [in the world of Peter Pan] are [those] most obviously offensive [because they are] most playfully obvious about their exaggerated and unrealistic nature [and so] most true to the original”. Yet the obvious conclusion, “true to the original”, is that any depictions of indigenous people in the world of Peter Pan are bound to be—just like the author-narrator’s voice in the source-text Peter and Wendy (the basis of all spinoffs) and its depictions of “redskins”—an abject failure.

As Jacqueline Rose first recognized and persuasively showed in her excellent criticism of Barrie’s Pan works, which remain some “of the most fragmented and troubled works in the history of children’s fiction”, there is a glaring “problem of writing, of address, and of language, in the history of Peter Pan.” In Peter and Wendy, especially, the line between narrator and characters is muddied, its narrative voice can be contradictory and wayward, she notes, and many of its passages are aberrant. Tiger Lily and her tribe were unlucky enough, and forever doomed, to be both awfully stereotyped and immortalized in the worst “classic” of English children’s literature ever written.

Works Cited and Consulted

Barrie, J. M. Peter and Wendy. Illustrated by F. D. Bedford. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911.

Nodelman, Perry. “Neverland and Our Land: Imagining Indigenous Peoples in the World of Peter Pan.” Perry Nodelman, n.d. [2019?], https://perrynodelman.com/neverland-and-our-land/.

“piccaninny, n.” Oxford English Dictionary, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/piccaninny_n.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Macmillan, 1984.

Wall, Barbara. The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction. St. Martin’s, 1991.

The author, a professor of literature, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All images are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.

by briangibson22

What do show windows have to do with The Wizard of Oz? (Lots!)

The mirror that Alice goes through into the looking-glass world . . . the wardrobe that Lucy Pevensie enters only to find Narnia . . . Max travelling out of his bedroom to the land of the wild things . . . Tom Long hearing a grandfather clock strike thirteen in the downstairs hall of a building in 1950s Cambridgeshire, then opening the back door to find himself in a vast garden in Victorian England . . .

Children’s literature is replete with portals. And Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), illustrated by W. W. Denslow, and the basis for the famous 1939 MGM film, is straw-stuffed to its scarecrow-brim with them. A cyclone whisks Dorothy, in her Kansas farmhouse with Toto (drawn by Denslow as a terrier), off on her dream-journey (“Dorothy soon closed her eyes and fell asleep”) to a faraway land. There, a yellow-brick road leads the little girl (about 5 or 6, going by Denslow’s drawings) to meet and join up with the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Lion en route to the Emerald City. In Ch. 10, Dorothy pushes a button to gain entry to a big gate, where a Guardian of the Gates fits them all with green glasses before, with a large gold key, unlocking “another gate, and they all followed him through the portal into the streets of the Emerald City.”

But the book’s true portals are its illustrations for the child reader, enticing them into the world of its “modernized fairy tale” through one window-like picture frame after another, some frames just like show windows, that is, a store’s display windows.

“You must be a great sorceress.”
W. W. Denslow’s full-page illustration for “Chapter III How Dorothy saved the Scarecrow.”

Retail and commercialism lie behind so much of Oz. Baum opened and ran a store, Baum’s Bazaar, in Aberdeen, South Dakota (two states north of Kansas), for just over a year; by 1893, he was a travelling glassware and chinaware salesman (Ch. 20 features a land of china) based in Chicago, where the World’s Fair that year showed off so many wares, exhibits, and innovations (the Emerald City seems to be based on the fair’s White City, built in just a year or two; in-between work for the Chicago Herald, Denslow visited the Fair). Then Baum helped customers design show windows, founded and edited The Show Window, a magazine for window decorators, served as secretary of the National Association of Window Trimmers, and published a treatise, The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors, in 1900. His title The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is advertisement-like, and, Michael Patrick Hearns notes, it became the “best-selling children’s book of the 1900 Christmas season” and a roaring success—“Baum and Denslow proved that novelty could sell.” In large part, that’s because the book was so resplendent with images, “[w]ith twenty-four color plates and over one hundred textual illustrations in varying colors,” Hearns notes, making it “one of the most lavishly illustrated American children’s books of the twentieth century.”

“‘This is a great comfort,’ said the Tin Woodman.”
Denslow’s full-page illustration for “Chapter V. The Rescue of the Tin Woodman”.

Denslow’s illustrations, right from the start, act as windows to draw us into the world of the text, echoing how Baum had, as Susan Wolstenholme notes, “turned the [show] window into the stage of a theatre and at the same time an advertising tool.” On the copyright page, for instance, the Tin Woodman is shown just outside the main picture-frame, looking in at the copyright notice tacked onto a tree. The contents page shows the floppy Scarecrow outside the main picture-frame, looking at a piece of paper, and then we see that the main picture, the “List of Chapters”, must be that piece of paper (and so we’ve entered the point-of-view of a character before having met him in the story!). And some of the chapter title-page illustrations or opening pages of chapters (featuring an initial letter) show a character leaning on the picture-frame or looking into the picture.

The opening page of “Chapter I. The Cyclone.”

But it’s with the full-colour plates that Denslow most slyly, splendiferously show-windows us into Oz. (The countries in Oz are associated with different hues, in keeping with colour theory, which Baum explains in The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors.) In the land of the Munchkins, its favourite colour blue, we look in at little Dorothy, garlanded and praised as a “‘great sorceress’” by Boq (who’s seen her silver shoes and knows she’s killed the wicked witch of the West), while a Munchkin fiddler, sitting on the picture frame and dangling his leg off it, and other Munchkins all direct our gaze at the girl. Even the man in the moon looks smilingly down on our heroine. (Toto, though, just looks shocked and overwhelmed.) Next, when Dorothy meets the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, the latter’s axe is leaning against the bottom right corner of the frame, making it all the more obvious that we are looking in on this world, granted a privileged view by image and text.

“‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’”
Denslow’s full-page illustration for “Chapter VI. The Cowardly Lion.”

And when Dorothy scolds the Lion, the smiling Scarecrow is floppily nestled, like a doll, in the bottom right corner of the frame, his left arm and hand dangling out, along with some of his head, and we can almost imagine plucking that long, stray piece of straw sticking out of the seam in his sack-like noggin.

“Permit me to introduce to you her Majesty, the Queen.”
Denslow’s full-page illustration for “Chapter IX. The Queen of the Field Mice.”

As we look in on Dorothy being presented to the Queen of the Field Mice by a smiling Tin Woodman, doffing his oil-can hat, all the mice in the frame drawing our gaze towards Dorothy, we notice that two mice, in outline, are outside the frame, as if in our (less substantial?) world, looking in, too. And a witch’s hat is partly out of the frame as we look in on the Wizard, in the Emerald City, cheerily admitting he’s a humbug, while the bespectacled quartet (plus a bespectacled Toto) peer askance at him, too. We soon look in on a very different throne-room moment, post-Wizard-departure, when the Scarecrow’s sitting in the high seat and thinking hard while his friends do, too, the Tin Woodman leaning back in contemplation in the bottom right corner of the frame, his legs bent or stretched metallically off the sill, bridging Oz’s world and our world.

“Exactly so! I am a humbug.”
Denslow’s full-page illustration for “Chapter XV. The Discovery of OZ, The Terrible.”

Then there is the world-within-a-world of the “dainty china country”, full of porcelain figurines, and a place so curious and strange that the larger, more powerful Dorothy and Toto stand just outside the frame, as if with us, looking in at these fragile little creatures (including a wee china dog staring eerily at his non-china counterpart). And, finally, in the red of Quadling Country, the Good Witch of the South, Glinda, gets the Golden Cap from Dorothy as her pals look on, the Scarecrow doing so while lying in the bottom left corner of the frame, his right leg and left foot (crossed underneath him) outside the picture. Again and again, then, the child reader feels as if they are right there, on the threshold, staring in, and can just step into the picture with the aid of the magical text of the story. The text itself, in decorative initials with Denslow’s illustrations around them, becomes a part of the world at the start of each chapter.

“The Scarecrow sat on the big throne.”
Denslow’s full-page illustration for “Chapter XVIII. Away to the South.”

In that story-world, though, the Wizard reveals himself to be an actor, magician, showman and, basically, conman—he’s used acting and props (a great Head, a lovely Lady, a terrible Beast, a Ball of Fire) to wow Dorothy and her pals and convince them to kill the Wicked Witch of the West (benefitting him) before they can gain their desires (returning home, a brain, a heart, and courage). He’s a kind of sham salesman. Stuart Culver argues that all relations in the book are commodity relations and the characters are like mannequins meant to stimulate consumer desire in “a gaudy, artificial fantasy world”. Are the show-window illustrations only adding to, even promoting, a sense of show, consumerism, and artifice? As Culver argues, are we readers being asked to be customers and buy false images and idols but never achieve the genuine identities we’re striving for in our consumption? Does Dorothy’s return to grey Kansas suggest, as Wolstenholme argues, that although “the world of the show window glitters with attraction, finally the consumer must go home”? Is the book suggesting that buying is a hollow substitute for home truths and family love (after all, Dorothy wants to return to Kansas, where, when she does, Aunt Em “cover[s] her face with kisses”)? Or implying that an imaginative, showy entertainment can be a harmless detour which only makes the beaten track more delightful to get back to? Or recognizing an emptiness at the heart of capitalism?

“These people were all made of china.”
Denslow’s full-page illustration for “Chapter XX. The Dainty China Country.”

Intriguingly, the Wizard excuses his years of ruling through façades, fakery, and showmanship thus: “‘How can I help being a humbug,’ he said, ‘when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can’t be done? It was easy to make the Scarecrow and the Lion and the Woodman happy, because they imagined I could do anything.’” Is this a comment on how consumers, like readers, want to be deceived, and how citizens want to be led by an illusion?

“You must give me the Golden Cap.”
Denslow’s full-page illustration for “Chapter XXIII. The Good Witch Grants Dorothy’s Wish.”

Certainly, all the emphasis on show, display, and (bright-coloured) spectacle, with its shop window-like illustrations the most important portal of all, make The Wonderful Wizard of Oz a quintessentially American book. And both Baum and Denslow would cash in and spin off. The pair, co-copyright holders, co-produced an adult-aimed “Musical Extravaganza” version of the book for the stage (notably, a few of Denslow’s Oz illustrations show characters dancing, prancing, or in a chorus-line formation) before they fell out after a dispute over royalties. Baum planned an Oz theme park (never built), wrote thirteen more Oz books, and moved to Hollywood in 1910, where he called his home “Ozcot” and founded The Oz Film Manufacturing Company in 1914 (it made three Oz films). Denslow published Denslow’s Scarecrow and The Tin-Man (1904), newspaper comic pages featuring the two characters, and bought a Bermuda island, naming himself King Denslow I. But he drank his money away, dying of pneumonia in a New York City hospital after a bender paid for by his $250 sale of a cover-illustration for a July 1915 issue of Life.

Works Cited and Consulted

Baum, Frank L. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 1900. Edited by Susan Wolstenholme, Oxford UP, 2000.

Culver, Stuart. “What Manikins Want: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows.” Representations, no. 21, Winter 1988, pp. 97-116.

Denslow, W. W., illustrator. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. George M. Hill, 1900.

Hearn, Michael Patrick, editor. The Annotated Wizard of Oz. W. W. Norton, 2000 [Centennial Edition].

Wolstenholme, Susan. Introduction. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Frank L. Baum, Oxford UP, 2000, pp. ix-xliii.

The author, a professor of literature, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All images are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.

by briangibson22

What’s the glaring blemish on Wilde’s “The Happy Prince”?

Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” (1888) is an Andersen-esque bedtime story that’s poetic, wryly humorous, richly melancholic, and playfully aestheticist (surface leads to depth: the statue of the Prince has the Swallow strip away his surface to substantively help those in need; the acts of sacrifice deepen the bond between the two). It’s deeply compassionate about the poor (when, some estimates have it, more than 25% of England was living in poverty) and slyly radical in its politics (socialist, anti-utilitarian, and homosocial). But it’s also, in one glaring blemish of a way, sadly conventional, even reactionary, for its time. Wilde is guilty, in his fable, of blatant anti-Semitism.

By the late 1800s, religious anti-Judaism had morphed into racial anti-Semitism (a term first used in the 1870s). Todd M. Endelman notes that, “in novels, newspapers, and the theatre, malicious or crude images of Jews were common fare. Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, as well as dozens of less talented scribblers, unhesitatingly incorporated grasping, lisping Jews into their fiction and journalism.” But Jew-hatred in Victorian England only got pronounced, it seems, with the migration, from the 1880s to the 1910s, of 120,000 to 150,000 Eastern European Jews to England in the wake of Russian pogroms and other persecutions on the continent.

Walter Crane’s frontispiece for The Happy Prince and Other Tales, 1888

In Wilde’s story, as the Swallow flies with a ruby (from the Prince’s sword-hilt) to give to a poor seamstress (with a sick child), embroidering a gown for an ignorant, cruel Queen’s maid-of-honour (like so many at the time, she thinks of the poor as lazy), he “passed over the Ghetto, and saw the old Jews bargaining with each other, and weighing out money in copper scales. At last he came to the poor house and looked in. The boy was tossing feverishly on his bed, and the mother had fallen asleep, she was so tired.” And so the Jews, self-involved and utterly uncaring about the poor, are associated only with money and graspingly, greedily holding onto it.

And it got worse. A few years later, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde offered up even more vile anti-Semitism with the figure of a theatre manager, defined by Dorian Gray for Lord Henry by his Jewishness (e.g., “The Jew manager”) and not his name or character: “‘A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. . . . There was something about him, Harry, that amused me. He was such a monster.’” (In some late twentieth-century editions of the novel—e.g., Dell Laurel, Signet—“Jew” is changed to “man”.) The manager, Mr. Isaacs, is much like a fairy-tale ogre from whom Sybil must be rescued by Dorian, “‘Prince Charming’”. Or he is a savage Other, like the beastly creature enslaved by Prospero in The Tempest: “the fat Jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with an oily, tremulous smile. He escorted them to their box with a sort of pompous humility, waving his fat jewelled hands, and talking at the top of his voice. Dorian Gray loathed him more than ever. He felt as if he had come to look for Miranda and had been met by Caliban.”

An anti-Semitic cartoon, by Philipp Rupprecht, depicting the Jew as corrupter of the innocent Aryan woman, from an interwar (c. 1920s) German schoolbook for children

Of course, by the time Wilde died of cerebral meningitis in Paris, in 1900—after his three infamous trials, his imprisonment and forced labour, his destitution, and his estrangement from his family—his name and works had become anathema to the public, so associated were they with homosexuality and degeneracy. And so that greater, Wilde-focussed public prejudice blotted out whatever pernicious influence the anti-Semitism in “The Happy Prince” and The Picture of Dorian Gray may have had. But modern anti-Semitism, particularly across Europe, helped bring the Nazis to power in Germany and led to the Holocaust. And Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wilde, though born into a Protestant family, must have been all too aware, growing up in Ireland, of how insidious, nasty, and dangerously effective prejudice against a group of people—reduced and demonized—could be. Sadly, he forgot that lesson in one of his (otherwise) great children’s stories.

Works Cited

Endelman, Todd M. The Jews of Britain: 1656-2000. U of California P, 2002.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Happy Prince.” 1888.

—. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891.

The author, a professor of literature, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All images are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.

by briangibson22

Who’s the author’s favourite in Treasure Island?

Parents aren’t supposed to have one child they like more than the others, but what about authors? Many writers must have, at least for some of their books, a favourite among their fictional progeny—a character of which they’re not only especially proud but fond.

The stand-out (on one leg) character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) is Long John Silver. He’s introduced to us, via letter, by the slightly foolish, credulous Squire Trelawney, who calls him “a man of substance” and speculates, with what seems like more than passing racism, that it is Silver’s wife, “as she is a woman of colour”, who “sends him back to roving”. That “roving” will be launched on the Hispaniola, taking Captain Smollett, Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, Jim Hawkins, and their crew of hired hands, with Silver as the cook, to the treasure on the map that Jim took from the murdered Billy Bones’s sea chest in his mother’s seaside inn.

Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins (illustration by Walter Paget, 1899)

Jim, concerned that Silver could be that dreaded “one-legged sailor” whom Bones once told him to watch out for, upon first meeting Silver finds him to be a pleasant, affable fellow. But soon, aboard the ship, hiding in an apple barrel, he overhears the peg-legged plotter’s plan to kill Smollett, Trelawney, Livesey, and co., and split the treasure with his fellow mutineers. Then, on the island, from a hiding-spot he sees, to his horror, just what Silver is capable of:

With a cry, [Silver] seized the branch of a tree, whipped the crutch out of his armpit, and sent that uncouth missile hurtling through the air. It struck poor Tom [an honest hand], point foremost, and with stunning violence, right between the shoulders in the middle of his back. His hands flew up, he gave a sort of gasp, and fell.

. . . Silver, agile as a monkey, even without leg or crutch, was on the top of him next moment, and had twice buried his knife up to the hilt in that defenceless body. From my place of ambush, I could hear him pant aloud as he struck the blows.

Silver, then, is a charmer, a dissembler, a schemer, a double-crosser, a mutineer, and a murderer. Yet we, like Jim, cannot look away, because he’s the adventure’s most fascinating character: so cool under fire, charming, devious, and wily. He’s the utterly compelling anti-hero who gave the book its original title The Sea Cook, who eclipses young hero Jim—questioning the basic notion of Treasure Island as a “boy’s book”—and who bothered some critics at the time, with more than one thinking the novel not “wholesome”. The unnamed reviewer in The Athenaeum felt that Silver should not have “got off”, that is, escaped Smollett, Hawkins, and co. when the Hispaniola docks at a port in Spanish America on the return home. Silver teaches Jim, and the child reader, that one seen anew as a “monster”—as Jim sees Silver on witnessing his murder of Tom—is very much a man, too. Silver acts fatherly to Jim and relies on him, more than once, to trust him, and Jim does see him as “twice the man” that the rest of the pirates are. And Stevenson leaves him out there, beyond the confines of the narrative, roaming and “roving” alive and free.

Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins (Walter Paget, 1899)

It’s Silver who, in Stevenson’s fable “The Persons of the Tale” (1895), steps outside the narrative, along with Captain Smollett, to take a smoke-break: “After the 32nd chapter of Treasure Island, two of the puppets strolled out to have a pipe before business should begin again, and met in an open place not far from the story.” In the novel, it’s Silver who, in his speech, warps and reshapes, as Emma Letley has noted, in a sign of distorted morality, our sense of “duty” as “‘dooty’”; “Deposed” is written in a Bible by the pirates as “Depposed”, which happens to emphasize how much Silver is posing, or acting; it’s the scoundrel of a sea cook who warps and reshapes our romantic sense of pirates, with his shiftiness, amorality, and roguish charm drawing us in as often as it appalls us. In “The Persons of the Tale”, a sly bit of metafiction with no comforting moral, Stevenson dives deeper into romance and fiction to more profoundly question reality, morality, and religion. Smollett and Silver talk of an “‘Author’” as if he’s God, but Silver’s point that “‘if the Author made you, he made Long John’” has us doubt God’s morality, especially since, as Silver declares, “‘if there is sich a thing as a Author, I’m his favourite chara’ter. He does me fathoms better’n he does you—fathoms, he does. . . . he’s on my side, and you may lay to it!’”. What does it mean when the darkest character is also the deepest, most enthralling, and, here, most self-aware (“‘I’m on’y a chara’ter in a sea story. I don’t really exist.’”)?

Long John Silver, Jim Hawkins, and the mutineers finding only bones (Walter Paget, 1899)

In his inimitable way, then, Stevenson’s favourite—and one of literature’s great villains—not only rends asunder any reassuring, escapist notion of a “boy’s adventure story” but turns the book into an anti-heroic anti-romance. (He is a darker reflection of Jim, whom he calls “‘the picter of my own self when I was young and handsome’”.) After all, when Silver escapes, at the end of the novel, taking a sack of coins with him, no-one wishes to pursue and re-capture him—they are mainly relieved that he’s no longer their concern: “I think we were all pleased to be so cheaply quit of him” (these are hardly heroes, then!). And it is largely because of Silver that Jim—who had “felt in this delightful dream” while “bound for an unknown island, and to seek for buried treasures!”—now, he remarks at story’s end, has his “worst dreams”, he tells us, “when I hear the surf booming about [Treasure Island’s] coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of [Silver’s parrot] Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: ‘Pieces of eight! pieces of eight’”. The metallic-named Silver takes the shine off buccaneering for Jim and for us; it’s the beguiling backstabber and cutthroat who makes it so horridly, unforgettably clear that a pirate’s treasure is blood-money, not just ill-gotten but murderously won. As Peter Hunt notes, such critics as Alistair Fowler and Naomi J. Wood have pointed out the novel’s “connotation of corruption and debasement attached to silver in a [1700s] world moving to the gold standard”; even Jim, Hunt observes, reflects on the cost of the booty when he is sorting through it: “what blood and sorrow . . . what shame and lies and cruelty”.

And so LJS is RLS’s favourite because he is the high-wire character, more than any other in the author’s works, who reveals the electric current of realism through romance, the darkness running through fiction that only seems mere child’s play.

Works Cited

Hunt, Peter. Introduction. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. vii-xxxi.

Letley, Emma. Introduction. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Oxford UP, 1998, pp. vii-xxiii.

Paget, Walter, illustrator. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Cassell, 1899.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. “A Fable: The Persons of the Tale.” 1895. Appendix 2 in Treasure Island, edited by Peter Hunt, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 192-94.

—. Treasure Island. 1883 [first book edition]. Oxford UP, 1998.

The author, a professor of literature, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All images are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.

by briangibson22

Why is Beth’s death in Little Women not so sad (and other historical quiddities)?

“the first pilgrim called was . . . the fittest”

                                                —the narrator, of Beth’s imminent death, in Little Women

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So begins L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Betweens (1953), but those words apply only too well to a deeply mid-nineteenth-century American book, Little Women (1868-69), brought to life on screen for nearly every new generation since the Gilded Age, with film versions in 1918, 1933, 1949, 1994, and 2019. (Of course, big-screen historical dramas and literary adaptations tend to reflect their own times.) Louisa May Alcott’s two-volume saga of the March sisters (published as Little Women and Good Wives in the UK) and their mother (“Marmee” to her girls) is most decidedly of its place and time—the volumes are set in a small Massachusetts town in 1861/62 and 1866-67—in four ways that seem curious, odd, and even discomfiting now.

The first is the caning of Amy at school, in the chapter “Amy’s Valley of Humiliation” (one of many references to John Bunyan’s 1678 Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, important to Alcott’s father and a book he passed on to his daughters). The blonde, youngest March sister is caught with pickled limes by her teacher, Mr. Davis, who rather favours Amy but “had declared limes a contraband article.” (Each March sister has her burden[s] to overcome and eventually embodies an ideal of nineteenth-century American Protestant womanhood; Amy’s burdens are selfishness and materialism, and she comes to represent piety.) Mr. Davis takes the ruler to Amy, then makes her stand before the class until recess. Amy, vowing to not return, goes home, where an “indignation meeting” is held. Jo delivers a letter from their mother to Mr. Davis; Mrs. March, disapproving of corporal punishment, Mr. Davis’s teaching, and of the girls with whom Amy is consorting, says that Amy will study with Beth (and Mrs. March will “‘ask your father’s advice before I send you anywhere else’”). So far, so understandable (and remarkably patriarchal—Mr. March is off at war!). But then Mrs. March tells Amy, “‘I am not sorry you lost [the limes], for you broke the rules, and deserved some punishment for disobedience.’” She continues, “‘I should not have chosen that way [standing in disgrace before the class] of mending a fault . . . but I’m not sure that it won’t do you more good than a milder method. You are getting to be altogether too conceited and important, my dear, and it is quite time you set about correcting it. . . . conceit spoils the finest genius. . . . the consciousness of possessing and using [talent] well should satisfy, and the great charm of all power is modesty.’” Humiliation is turned by the matriarch into a necessary humbling; the wrongness of corporal punishment is righted and rewritten into a homily and lesson about the Christian virtue of humility. And so, in Alcott’s constantly educative book, family provides the best education of all—Amy does not need the institution of school.

Amy bore without flinching several tingling blows
 
(Drawing by Frank T. Merrill for the first illustrated edition [1880] of Little Women)

(In the 1994 film, Amy’s victimization is emphasized, with Mr. Davis made a sexist brute. The caning isn’t shown but Amy [Kirsten Dunst] is afterwards, crying and telling Jo [Winona Ryder] outside their wealthy aunt’s house, “Teacher struck me.” Then, with all gathered in the kitchen as loyal servant Hannah bathes Amy’s wealed hand, Amy explains what happened while Marmee [Susan Sarandon] and Jo pace angrily about; Amy notes, “Mr. Davis said it was as useful to educate a woman as to educate a female cat.”)

(In the 2019 film, Amy’s punishment is a means for drawing the Marches together, hinting at romance, and emphasizing female creativity. The aspiring artist, to gain more limes from and have her lime-debt erased by a classmate, caricatures Mr. Davis on her slate and is caught. [This reworks a moment in the book, when Amy recalls Mr. Davis catching and punishing a classmate who had caricatured him.] Cut to a tutored Laurie [Timothee Chalamet] finding Amy [Florence Pugh] outside the Laurences’ house, wailing. She comes in, acts the lady in the library, charming Laurie [hinting at their romance and marriage]; Meg [Emma Watson] arrives, catching the eye of tutor Mr. Brooke [hinting at their marriage]; Jo [Saoirse Ronan]—her writing career is the film’s focus—arrives to marvel at the books; Marmee [Laura Dern] arrives, telling Amy that she will take her out of school, and Jo will teach her.)

“They all drew to the fire, mother in the big chair, with Beth at her feet”
 
(Drawing by Frank T. Merrill for the first illustrated edition [1880] of Little Women)

The second is the attitude of Little Women to alcohol. After Meg (burdens: vanity and disdain for housework; comes to represent purity and learns to value the home) gets drunk on champagne at a party, and Jo is “‘glad you [Laurie] were not in the saloon, because I hope you never go to such places’”, Meg, at her wedding, notes to Laurie, now in his late teens, that her father only thinks wine should be for the ill, while her mother “‘says that neither she nor her daughters will ever offer it to any young man under her roof.’” Laurie then promises the newlywed Mrs. Brooke and Jo that he will be abstemious, “for which,” the narrator notes, “he thanked them all his life”. Thus the book, implying that alcohol is irreligious, makes its pro-temperance stance.

Abstinence-pledging groups, in which women were prominent, had begun in the 1840s. Temperance, largely a Protestant and rural (and anti-urban) crusade, was soon led by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the male Anti-Saloon League, and associated alcohol with sinfulness. (It all culminated, of course, in Prohibition.) But temperance was also a means of talking (indirectly) about and fighting abuse and marital rape in the home. Working-class and immigrant populations, though, were targeted; Irish and Italians, especially, and other cultures where alcohol was important were hurt by liquor bans and “dry” campaigns. Anti-Irishness is played for laughs in Little Women with Beth’s meant-to-be-comic portrait of a poor, hungry Irishwoman getting a fish from Mr. Laurence (“‘Oh, she did look so funny, hugging the big, slippery fish, and hoping Mr. Laurence’s bed in heaven would be “aisy.”’”) and the narrator’s meant-to-be-comic listing of some rural creatures: “Laurie [threw] up his hat and [caught] it again, to the great delight of two ducks, four cats, five hens, and half a dozen Irish children”.

(In the 1994 film, drinking is turned into a criticism of the patriarchy. Laurie [Christian Bale] makes no promise of abstinence at Meg’s wedding, but he does see Meg [Trini Alvarado], at a ball in Boston, vainly going along with a snobby, patrician crowd and drinking champagne, which he takes from her, remarking, “Miss March—I thought your family were temperance people.” Back at home, before bed, Meg asks her mother, “Why is it Laurie may do as he likes, and flirt and tipple champagne, and no-one thinks the less of him?” “Well,” Marmee replies, “I suppose for one practical reason: Laurie is a man, and, as such, he may vote, and hold property, and pursue any profession he pleases. And so he is not so easily demeaned.”)

(In the 2019 film, drinking isn’t looked down on at all—indeed, in Greta Gerwig’s script, as if channeling Gerwig’s whirling, carefree characters in Damsels in Distress or Frances Ha, Meg is described, at the party, as “done up nearly beyond recognition. She’s powdered and corseted and drinking and flirting. In fact, she’s kind of great at it.”)

The First Wedding
 
(Drawing by Frank T. Merrill for the first illustrated edition [1880] of Little Women)

The third is marriage—it needs parents’ approval and needn’t be for love (you wouldn’t know that at all from the 1994 and 2019 film versions), because love can come after it. In Alcott’s book, Mrs. March tells Jo of how John Brooke, Laurie’s tutor, talked to her and her husband about his love for Meg: “‘He only wanted our leave to love her and work for her, and the right to make her love him if he could’” (my emphasis). And the narrator discloses to us the matriarch’s final words to herself in that chapter, “Confidential”, as if they are a tender aside to the reader: “Mrs. March said, with a mixture of satisfaction and regret, ‘She does not love John yet, but will soon learn to.’” (Those final words would sound ominous today in a sci-fi or horror movie.) And, later, Mrs. March is relieved to hear that Jo doesn’t love Laurie “‘anything more’” than she always has—that is, as a dear friend—because, she says, “‘I don’t think you suited to one another. . . . I fear you would both rebel if you were mated for life. You are too much alike, and too fond of freedom, not to mention hot tempers and strong wills, to get on happily together, in a relation which needs infinite patience and forbearance, as well as love.’” Then Jo says of Laurie, to Beth, “‘Amy is left for him’”! It’s as if one of the eligible sisters, so much of a March-ness, will do for Laurie. Laurie even explains to Jo (burdens: anger and dislike for womanhood; comes to represent feminine decorum) his marriage to Amy thus: “‘Amy and you change places in my heart, that’s all’.” (Imagine any newlywed man saying that today to his sister-in-law!)

Mrs. March would not leave Beth’s side
 
(Drawing by Frank T. Merrill for the first illustrated edition [1880] of Little Women)

The fourth is Beth’s death, which is really not so sad, because of the family’s faith and because the death is so spiritually transfiguring for another sister. Beth, whose burden is shyness, comes to represent submissiveness—to fate, to death, and so to God. She is the March sister who embodies meekness, too, and is that ideal nineteenth-century “angel in the house”—a term even used to describe her. And Beth is Exhibit B of the nineteenth-century literary trope of the holy child dying (made most famous by Dickens, with the death of Little Nell), a sentimental tradition that transforms Jo, the sister most devoted to her, marking the death of her girlhood. We know that Beth’s death is not all that sad, but preordained—part of the author’s (and God’s?) plan—because it’s foreshadowed in Chapter 4, “Burdens”: “There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully, that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth [an allusion to Dickens] stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.”

With her head in Jo’s lap, while the wind blew healthfully over her
 
(Drawing by Frank T. Merrill for the first illustrated edition [1880] of Little Women)

In a book rife with lessons, Jo learns patience, charity, loyalty, and faith from Beth’s death, and pledges herself to a better ambition—immortal love, for God. As her younger sister nears the end of her seventeen years on earth, Jo pens a poem, “My Beth”, in which she calls Beth that “‘serene and saintly presence’” who “‘Sanctifies’” the “‘home’”, asks to be given some of her courage and unselfishness, which will make “‘our parting daily loseth / Something of its bitter pain’”, hopes that grief will make her “‘wild nature more serene’”, and looks ahead to renewed “‘Hope and faith, born of my sorrow’”, with Beth’s death thus showing the way to “‘home’”, that is, Heaven. (Perhaps it is altogether too poetic that “Beth” rhymes with . . .) Death is beautiful in that it brings you to God. The narrator tells us, after noting how “a bird sang blithely on a budding bough . . . the snow-drops blossomed freshly at the window, and the spring sunshine streamed in like a benediction over the placid face upon the pillow”, that Mrs. March, Meg, Jo, and Amy “thanked God that Beth was well at last”—it marks an end to her earthly suffering. Beth’s death—at a time when so many American children died young—is so much of a religiously-understood departure and comfort (and not, by today’s standards, a grief-filled tragedy or loss not-to-be-gotten-over) that Amy’s acceptance of Laurie’s proposal comes just a dozen pages after it, at the end of the next chapter, “Learning To Forget”. Even on the second-last page of the book, when we learn that Laurie and Amy’s one girl (called, yes, Beth!) may die young, the narrator tells us that, should she, it will only bring them closer: “the shadow over Amy’s sunshine . . . was doing much for both father and mother, for one love and sorrow bound them closely together.” Not only is death never the end, but it offers, for those who remain, betterment and renewal.

The Valley of the Shadow
 
(Drawing by Frank T. Merrill for the first illustrated edition [1880] of Little Women)

(In the 1994 film, Beth’s death is a simple tearjerker, its staged and secular sadness sanctifying Jo. Marmee sobs after telling Jo that Beth [Claire Danes], pallid and propped up on pillows, has, she thinks, “been waiting for you.” Mother and daughter embrace; cut to Beth, eyes shining happily as Jo feeds her broth, then seeming better as Jo performs a reading for her. Yet Beth, voice cracking, diminishes herself and raises Jo up: “I never saw myself as anything much. I’m not a great writer, like you . . . you will be [a great writer]. . . . I can be brave, like you. But I know I’ll be homesick for you, even in heaven.” Then, when Jo shuts the window and looks out at the howling wind and the trees, the music swells, she turns, and her sister has died. The next morning, Hannah drops petals on Beth’s empty bed and her dolls. There is no sense of Beth going to heaven. When Jo asks, in the very next scene, “Will we never all be together again?”, there is no answer from her mother or father, dressed in black. There is only silence in the house.)

(In the 2019 film, Beth’s death is all about Jo’s loss and memory, burnished by shots and cuts, sanctifying cinema itself. In a flashback, Jo remembers lying in bed with a gravely ill Beth [Eliza Scanlen] and telling her to “please fight”, then waking up to come downstairs and find her all better; another flashback, sun-lit, recalls Mr. March coming home from the war. But then, in the present, amid blues and greys, Jo comes downstairs to find Marmee crying and Beth not at the table—Marmee is so distraught that she reaches out for and presses herself into Jo, and it is the child who holds the parent. There’s no sense of God; no words console. The next scene, also wordless, begins with a long shot of Mr. and Mrs. March, Jo, Meg, and a few others standing by Beth’s grave, in the woods, and ends with a close-up of Jo, just staring down; cut to a flashback where Jo’s looking at Beth, decorating outside the home for Meg’s wedding. And so, better than Jo the writer could do [as grief is shown to be beyond words], Gerwig the auteur’s film—with its flashbacks and crosscuts—finds comfort and sadness . . . in secular, cinematic memory.)

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is a domestic story that is, in the end and in all of its characters’ endings, earnestly sunny, for it believes in a home after ours, one where the “Heavenly Father”, as Marmee tells her girls, has such “strength and tenderness”. All the “little women” are married off, including Beth, as she is bound to die and so be with that “Friend who welcomes every child with a love stronger than that of any father, tenderer than that of any mother.” Marmee tells Jo that, after loving those here among us, “‘the best lover of all comes to give you your reward.’” Today, perhaps only a Christian film-industry production could offer an adaptation of Little Women truer to Alcott’s time, nestling us closer to the book’s homey, Protestant values.

Works Cited and Consulted

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. 1868-69. Edited by Valerie Alderson, Oxford UP, 1998.

Alderson, Valerie. Explanatory Notes. 1994. Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, Oxford UP, 1998, pp. 474-89.

Little Women. Directed by Gillian Armstrong, Columbia, 1994.

Little Women. Directed by Greta Gerwig, Sony, 2019.

Merrill, Frank T., illustrator. Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, Roberts Brothers, 1880.

The author, a professor of literature, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All images are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.

by briangibson22

Are the Grimms really that grim? And sexual? (Yes!)

In English, “Grimm” seems like a classic case of nominative determinism (I am named, therefore I am). Just riffle through any Brothers Grimm anthology for proof of the German folktale-collectors and -retellers’ grimness. Take “The Stubborn Child” (c. 1819):

Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what its mother told it to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon the child, and let it become sick. No doctor could cure it and in a short time the child lay on its deathbed. After it was lowered into its grave and covered over with earth, one of its little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.

A 139-word distillation of Grim(m)ness, surely! There’s the recalcitrant child, not honouring its mother, and so the harsh Old Testament God neglects it, letting it be taken by illness, only for the still-defiant child, trying to resist our “dear” heavenly Father (not to mention death), needing one final smack by its earthly parent to be put in its resting-place (and so it has “peace beneath the earth,” echoing Luke 2:14: “on earth peace, good will toward men”). The end, happily ever after?!?

Folk tales, told and passed down by common people, communicate a sense of wonder, but the wonder here is an awe-filled affirmation of the power of God and adult authority. Especially to a modern reader, this tale just seems horrifying (and zombie-like). But the Grimms were writing in an age far grimmer than today, with the times unkind to der kinder. Children weren’t only surrounded by death but often taken by it—the infant mortality rate was quite high—and even then, if they lived, many children were abandoned by parents (see “Hansel and Gretel”).

Sculpture for “The Frog King” by Shaun Tan, The Singing Bones (2016)

The brothers, Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859), gathered their folk tales and first published them between 1812 and 1815, but, with each edition of their collected stories (seven in all, the last published in 1857), they altered and revised more and more for middle-class respectability, softening and sanitizing by removing suggestions of sex, adding Christian references, emphasizing gender roles more for patriarchal society, and making mothers stepmothers (thus shifting any sense of animus away from biological parents).

So, comparing first version with last, we see how the Grimms’ opening tale in their collection, “The Frog King or Iron Heinrich”—likely from a story told in Kassel’s Wild family (Wilhelm married a woman from the family)—is an “animal-groom” story, about a creature bargaining for a place in the princess’s bed and marriage (“if you’ll love and cherish me”) to her:

18121857
The frog said, “I do not want your pearls, your precious stones, and your clothes, but if you’ll accept me as a companion and let me sit next to you and eat from your plate and sleep in your bed, and if you’ll love and cherish me, then I’ll bring your ball back to you.”The frog answered, “I do not want your clothes, your pearls and precious stones, nor your golden crown, but if you will love me and accept me as a companion and playmate, and let me sit next to you at your table and eat from your golden plate and drink from your cup and sleep in your bed, if you will promise this to me, then I’ll dive down and bring your golden ball back to you.”
Illustration for The Frog Prince by Walter Crane, 1874

The animal-groom tale commonly reflects notions of women finding male sexuality ugly, scary, etc. When the frog appears at the palace door, the female’s immediate, outsized fear is remarkable:

Frightened, she slammed the door and returned to the table. The king saw that her heart was pounding and asked, “Why are you afraid?”

“There is a disgusting frog out there,” she said . . .. . . “it is a disgusting frog.”

And it becomes clear—though clearest in the first version—why the princess does not want to let him in. The tale is, most of all, about a young (virgin) woman’s (understandable) fear of penetrative sex and her disgust and repugnance for the male member (implied by the frog in his clamminess and earthiness—more representative of the testicles than the penis). But the unwilling bride’s kingly father, representing the patriarchy and ruling over his daughter, commands her to fulfill her bargain and be with the creature. (In the palace, she hardly speaks, but almost always obeys, made compliant by male authority.) So, after the frog has sat with her and eaten from her plate:

When he had eaten all he wanted, he said, “Now I am tired and want to sleep. Take me to your room, make your bed, so that we can lie in it together.”

The princess was horrified when she heard that. She was afraid of the cold frog and did not dare to even touch him, and yet he was supposed to lie next to her in her bed; she began to cry and didn’t want to at all.

There was no helping it; she had to do what her father wanted, but in her heart she was bitterly angry. She picked up the frog with two fingers, carried him to her room, and climbed into bed, but instead of laying him next to herself, she threw him bang! against the wall.

“Now you will leave me in peace, you disgusting frog!”

But when the frog came down onto the bed, he was a handsome young prince, and he was her dear companion, and she held him in esteem as she had promised, and they fell asleep together with pleasure.		The frog enjoyed his meal, but for her every bite stuck in her throat. Finally he said, “I have eaten all I want and am tired. Now carry me to your room and make your bed so that we can go to sleep.”

The princess began to cry and was afraid of the cold frog and did not dare to even touch him, and yet he was supposed to sleep in her beautiful, clean bed.

She picked him up with two fingers, carried him upstairs, and set him in a corner. As she was lying in bed, he came creeping up to her and said, “I am tired, and I want to sleep as well as you do. Pick me up or I’ll tell your father.”
With that she became bitterly angry and threw him against the wall with all her might.

“Now you will have your peace, you disgusting frog!”

But when he fell down, he was not a frog, but a prince with beautiful friendly eyes. And he was now, according to her father’s will, her dear companion and husband. He told her how he had been enchanted by a wicked witch, and that she alone could have rescued him from the well, and that tomorrow they would go together to his kingdom. Then they fell asleep.
Illustration by Oskar Herrfurth, c. 1920s or earlier

The first version makes the princess’s fear of, anger about, refusal of, and then (after crossing the threshold to enter her bedroom) pleased acceptance of sex (once he is so clearly a “handsome young” man), more obvious: “She was afraid of the cold frog and did not dare to even touch him, and yet he was supposed to lie next to her in her bed” –> “she was bitterly angry . . . instead of laying him next to herself, she threw him bang! against the wall” –> “when the frog came down onto the bed” –> “they fell asleep together with pleasure”. But the revisions turn the story away from its original focus on female sexuality, even female sexual pleasure or excitement by the end, and morph it into a story of female revulsion with or repulsion of male sexuality and anxiety about marriage, resolved by patriarchal command: “he was now, according to her father’s will, her dear companion and husband.”

There’s still the fascinating paradox that it’s only when the virgin, commanded to submit, acts on her anger and fear, violently throwing the creature against the wall (trying to kill him?), that he transforms into the man she can accept, sleep with, and love. (Most variations on the story, from different countries, involve the princess being nasty to the frog at first—some even have her beheading the suitor or tearing him, as a snake, in two.)

But the Grimms’ story isn’t over—it’s capped off with “Iron Heinrich”. The commanded princess is, even after her moment of violent refusal, dismissed by the end, which sees the prince reunite with his servant, who “had had three iron bands put round his heart to stop it bursting with grief and sorrow”. In David Luke’s translation, “Faithful Harry” is “full of joy that his master had been saved”. Unlike the princess, who hadn’t wanted to honour her promise, Heinrich/Harry is—embodying loyalty and strength, seen as German values; the Grimms were nationalists—dutiful, duty-bound, and so thankful for his master’s return, so full of love for him, that his three bands crack apart and fall, “because his master was saved and happy”. Thus ends the story, with its true love being the male servant’s love for his master. The patriarchy is upheld; only male-male, class-bound love can be trusted. The end, happily ever after?!?

Illustration for The Frog Prince by Walter Crane, 1874

Works Cited

Ashliman, D. L. “The Frog King or Iron Heinrich by the Brothers Grimm[:] a comparison of the versions of 1812 and 1857.” Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts, https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/frogking.html, revised 30 Nov. 2005.

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. “The Stubborn Child.” c. 1819. Translated by Jack Zipes (with emendations according to the original German, where the neuter was used for the child).

—. “The Frog King, or Iron Harry.” 1857. Selected Tales. 1982. Translated by David Luke, Penguin, 2004, pp. 271-74.

—. The Frog Prince. Illustrated by Walter Crane. George Routledge and Sons, 1874.

Tan, Shaun. The Singing Bones. Arthur A. Levine, 2016.

The author, a professor of literature, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All images are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.