Today is December 7th. In addition to being the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, it's the last day of the Cuci Mata discussion of An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott. Fortunately, I am just about out of thoughts on this subject and ready to put it to rest. The bottom line is we're supposed to decide if we think this book stands the so-called test of time when it comes to race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Does it deserve classic status?
An Old-Fashioned Girl deals much more with gender and class than it does with race and ethnicity. The little it has to say about race is not positive. Early on, Polly, the protagonist whose values and behavior are superior to that of almost all the other characters, objects to a play she's been invited to for a number of reasons, one of them being that the players, whom she originally thought were supposed to be "sparkling creatures" from "fairy-land," "sang negro melodies, talked slang, and were a disgrace to the good old-fashioned elves whom she knew and loved so well." Of course, given that Alcott had that Transcendentalist thing going and the Transcendentalists were pro-abolition, maybe she really is just talking musical taste. I guess you can believe a people shouldn't be enslaved without loving their music. Today's young readers, however, living in a twenty-first century world where African American musicians are highly regarded and popular, may be mystified by the comment. The same is true of Alcott's depictions of Irish women servants. Most child readers will never have seen a servant, anyway, forget about one who arrived from Ireland so recently that she still speaks with a heavy accent.
Are there enough race and ethnicity problems to deny An Old Fashioned Girl classic status? Probably not.
I have to say that the same is true for gender and class. An Old-Fashioned Girl is all about gender and class. While I don't like the stereotypes here and would even go so far as to say that I find most of them uninteresting, I have to say that a lot of them appear in contemporary fiction. Maybe stereotypical, uninteresting teenage behavior makes a book timeless.
I would argue that An Old-Fashioned Girl isn't a timeless work of children's literature for other reasons--its awkward structure connecting what is essentially an adult book with an older children's story, its extremely judgmental and instructive attitude, and its romanticizing of poverty and women as wives and mothers. But that's not what we were asked to consider in making our judgment.
An Old-Fashioned Girl is a marvelous piece for an adult reader interested in children's fiction and women's history, though. It's been a fun blogging week.
You guessed it, followers. Today we are considering gender in An Old-Fashioned Girl.
Louisa May Alcott covers a wide array of women in An OFG. Are they classic types? Are they stereotypes?
In addition to Polly, whose perfection stems from her adherence to old-fashioned values, we have her friend, Fanny, who might be the only character with any real depth and certainly the only character who is at all dynamic, since she changes. She begins as a shallow rich girl, interested only in being with her friends and fashion. This is a character we see a great deal of in YA today. Even in books that are not of the teen-girl-gone-bad variety, adolescent young women are often portrayed as being fixated on friends, clothing, and boys. Personally, I have no idea whether or not they are or the adult publishing world simply believes they are. With Fanny, there is a sense that she, unlike most of the other shallow rich girls she knows, is just a bit troubled. Particularly after she reaches adulthood, she appears to be looking around with a "Now what?" attitude. (I see this as a twenty-something scenario, by the way, not YA.)
Oddly enough, Fanny has what might be described as a posse, like the ones you see in many YA books today. The members of it are pretty much interchangable, which you often see today, also. In fact, you could probably switch some of Fanny's posse members with some from a contemporary posse without a lot of effort. A timeless element.
Also, that's an idea for a book! I've got to remember to write that in my journal.
Grandma Shaw is a revered elder woman. At the beginning of the book she is neglected and unappreciated by the young until Polly teaches everyone that she has much to offer them. Elderly people are often portrayed this way in all kinds of literature today, suggesting that writers are terrified of growing old.
Mrs. Shaw, Fanny's mother, is a minor but fascinating character if you know anything about late nineteenth century women's history. Lucky for you guys, I do. Mrs. Shaw is a sickly woman. The infirm woman is a late nineteenth century phenomena, of which much has been written. She appears in adult fiction in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. (I am sure all you former women's studies students remember that fondly.) What is so intriguing about Mrs. Shaw is that the third-person narrator really, really dislikes her. Both the narrator (who occasionally breaks out of omniscient mode to address readers as "I") and Polly have absolutely no sympathy for Mrs. Shaw, who they portray as not pulling her weight as either a mother or a wife.
I'm not an expert on nineteenth century fiction and can't recall reading many other fictional portrayals of invalid women from that period. I'd be interested to know whether or not this is a common attitude toward them or if Alcott is doing something unique here.
When Polly moves to Boston to work as a music teacher, she rents a room with a spinster (a word that appears to have no negative connotations for Alcott--maybe it didn't in her day), Miss Mills, who could easily end up being Polly's future if she remains unmarried. Miss Mills, maybe even more so than Polly, is a saintly character. She's poor enough to have to rent out rooms in her house but not so poor as to have to wait on others like the Irish women servants. Thus she is the right kind of poor. And being ennobled by poverty, she spends her time doing good works for others.
So we have a lot of very traditional portrayals of women here--very good girl, shallow adolescent, revered grandmother, bad mom, and saintly caretaker. And then, out of nowhere, in a chapter called "The Sunny Side," we get something entirely different.
Polly takes Fanny, who, remember, is sort of at a loss as to what to do with her adult self, particul
Today we will consider class and, to a much lesser extent, ethnicity.
In An Old-Fashioned Girl Alcott romanticizes what used to be known as genteel poverty--your better-quality people who have fallen on hard times or perhaps have just never had much in the way of disposable income. Polly Milton comes from just that sort of background. She hasn't been exposed to wealthy adults who encourage materialism in their young and who enjoy seeing children imitating adult behavior. (Something that many would argue hasn't changed since Alcott's time.) Whether fourteen or twenty, Polly is full of so many good qualities that seem to be a product of her poorer upbringing--She knows how to have good, clean fun making candy, how to empathize with those who are even poorer than herself, how to get over her envy of others who have more, how to remake last season's clothes, how to respect and admire her elders, how to play in the snow, how to make others feel good. These things either come naturally to her or are taught to her by her poor but noble mother "whose dress never was too fine for little wet cheeks to lie against, or loving little arms to press." Polly's fine manners don't come naturally to the wealthy Shaw children, whose own mother, Polly believes, doesn't have a "right motherly heart" and didn't teach her young to stand when Grandma enters the room or to show proper sibling love toward one another.
The Shaw children's father is a man of business who worked his way up from humble beginnings to an upper-class New England life. He is a very sympathetic character; his early poverty is a big plus and, presumably, is the reason he recognizes Polly's sterling qualities and hopes they will rub off on his own daughter.
Polly's kind of poverty is placed on a pedestal. Another figure in the book suffers from much more serious want. Jane Bryant (whose name, I think, is sometimes Jenny) is a seventeen-year-old girl who is alone in the world and unable to make enough money to live. She finds her situation so dire that she tries killing herself. But even here we have a romanticized ending when she is saved by the "old and homely, and good and happy" Miss Mills and befriended by "dear, kind" Polly.
Polly's kind of poverty is good. Jane's kind of poverty is bad. But the very poor can benefit from Polly's attentions just as the very rich can.
How good is Polly's kind of poverty? There is only one path to nobility for the Shaw family. They must become poor like Polly. In fact, you could argue that Polly's eventual mate only becomes good enough for her when he loses his money and becomes noble and poor like she is.
Except for Jane/Jenny, we don't see a lot of truly poor characters. The few servants who appear are Irish women who are portrayed as weak or even cowardly. In a warm-hearted intergenerational scene, Grandma Shaw, who is everything you could ever ask of a grandmother (though I don't think she bakes) tells the children a story from her childhood in which she refers to her family's servant as "our own stupid Biddy" and then goes on to make fun of her, including an imitation of her brogue. Neither Polly, nor the third-person narrator, object to this.
Legend has it that Alcott and her family nearly starved one winter when her father made his ill-fated attempt at communal living. She also served as a nurse during the Civil War. She was the main source of support for her parents as well as herself. This is a woman who experienced real poverty and saw real suffering. So what's going on with the glow she throws around Polly? (And, to my recollection now, the March family in Little Women?) Is it a coping mechanism to make her own past more acceptable? She also romanticizes the elderly (Grandma Shaw) and the West (Tom goes out there to make his fortune and comes back so brown, healthy, and manly). Is this some kind of Victorian thing? She grew up in a Transcendental culture. Does romanticizing the common person in the form of the poor
We're in the midst of the Cuchi Mata discussion period for Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl. We're going to be considering how race, ethnicity, gender, and class are treated and whether or not those treatments stand the test of time.
I am so overwhelmed with thoughts about this book that it's going to take more than one post to contain them.
First off, what is this thing about? According to the author's own Preface, An Old-Fashioned Girl is really two books. The first book is about Polly Milton, a poor, old-fashioned girl who comes to Boston to visit her much better off friend Fanny Shaw and her family. Polly, I believe, is around fourteen and Fanny a year or two older. A visit back then means two months. (It's an accepted fact in my family that I can only tolerate being with other people for three hours. I can double that for a holiday, but I will need to rest most of the next day. I found the idea of a two-month visit both fascinating and horrifying.)
This portion of the book reminded me a lot of Best Friends for Never, the one volume of The Clique series that I've read. You've got the same outsider less-well-off girl circling the group of wealthy girls. In that way, you do seem to have a timeless situation here. The big difference is that Alcott provides an extremely judgmental third-person narrator. There is absolutely no doubt that Polly is Polly Perfect, that old-fashioned country values are far preferable to nineteenth century Boston's big city ways.
Evidently that first half of the book about fourteen-year-old Polly was the original book. The second half takes place six years later and appears to have been written because Alcott received requests for a sequel. Polly has been visiting the Shaws regularly over the years and now comes to Boston to work, while Fanny is sort of struggling with ennui and her brother, good-natured Tom, is living the good life at college. This second half would probably not be published as a children's book or even a YA today. While the characters are determining what kind of people they are going to be (good old-fashioned sorts or bad modern types), a theme that I associate with YA, they are also all in their twenties and sorting out work and settling into marriages, not a YA situation. The third-person narration makes it clear that Polly's work ethic and values are still to be preferred over all but those of an older spinster who has committed her life to serving others.
This is hardcore nineteenth century instructive, improving literature for the young. In her Preface, Alcott is very clear that this is no accident. She knows exactly what she's doing:
"The 'Old-Fashioned Girl' is not intended as a perfect model, but as a possible improvement upon the Girl of the Period, who seems sorrowfully ignorant or ashamed of the good old fashions..."
"If the history of Polly's girlish experiences suggests a hint or insinuates a lesson, I shall feel that, in spite of many obstacles, I have not entirely neglected my duty toward the little men and women..."
Speaking of little men and women, I suspect that there was a lot of this same type of instruction in those two works I loved so when I was young. This makes me wonder if children can tolerate preaching a lot better than adults can.
Okay. The stage has been set.
Brilliant.