Hediger 1 Kit's Surprise: a Christmas Story Is the Third Book in The
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Hediger 1 Kit’s Surprise: A Christmas Story is the third book in the American Girl series that follows the life of Kit, a nine-year-old girl growing up during the Great Depression. Throughout this chapter book, Kit negotiates the relationship between reality and fantasy. Kit’s realistic outlook, prompted by her family’s financial woes in the Great Depression, contrasts with her well-off best friend Ruthie’s penchant for princess and ogre stories (Tripp 14). Ruthie attempts to give Kit one of her old Christmas dresses and free ballet tickets so they can continue their holiday tradition of going out with their mothers. When Kit refuses to accept Ruthie’s gift out of pride and shame, an ensuing fight between them dramatizes this conflict between reality and fantasy. Kit yells: “You’re always talking about wishes and wicked ogres and make-believe. You don’t know what’s real. Your father still has his job. You can do whatever you want. You have everything, except you don’t have any idea what the world is really like” (34). Kit refuses to believe that the imaginary can have any benefit until she begins to write one afternoon: Once upon a time, she began. And then the story seemed to sweep her away. It wasn’t the kind of story she usually wrote for her newspaper. This story was not about facts. It didn’t report what was really happening. This story was about a completely different world, the kind of world Ruthie liked, a world that was imaginary. In this world, Kit could make anything she wanted to happen happen. (47-8) She soon realizes how the imaginary can make her worries prompted by the Great Depression disappear. Moreover, she discovers a power and freedom in fantasy, which is not a mere luxury. She actually needs this other world in order to cope with the great problems that she, as a child, suffers due to the Depression. Hediger 2 Kit’s Surprise suggests that the imagination makes things “happen”; it gives Kit control in a world where, as a child at the mercy of financial and social forces beyond her control, she can only do so much on her own. By the story’s end, she and Ruthie mend their friendship, and for Christmas Kit gives Ruthie a story she wrote, entitled “The Story of Princess Ruthie” (63). Acknowledging imagination’s power to enhance the real world permits Kit to “fix” her own reality and results in greater mutual understanding between her and Ruthie. Fantasy, imagination—fiction writing and writing fiction—empowers Kit and, by extension, the girl- reader of Kit’s Surprise. Fiction gives Kit and her girl-readers the agency to better comprehend social realities and the courage to cope with them. The Dear America chapter-book series, another historical fiction series for girl-readers, also thematizes the tie between the real and the imaginary, though it approaches the theme by representing fantasy as more than a creation of the individual imagination. As per the series’ trademark, Christmas After All: The Great Depression Diary of Minnie Swift presents a fictional girl’s diary “written” during the Great Depression. In Minnie’s diary, Minnie and her female family members go window-shopping, stopping at a fancy department store that has “the most elegant gifts in the world” (Laskey 133). This moment prompts her to reflect on the stark “collision between realness and fantasy” that characterizes her Great Depression world. After describing some of the objects in the window, Minnie writes in her diary: Who is going to buy a three-hundred-dollar clock or even a snow baby that costs eight dollars? But there were scads of people pressing up against the glass at Charles Mayer’s. Sometimes when I think about this Great Depression I think that there has never been such a collision between realness and fantasy. It is as if we are Hediger 3 standing with our feet in the muck and grime of these hard times but our noses are pressed up against the window of some fantastically glamorous world. These times are so strange. And that reminds me. Mama is talking about shutting down another room—her and Papa’s bedroom. She says that as long as Papa’s not here she might as well sleep in with Clem and Gwen. What if the winter is really long and cold? Where will we get enough money for coal? (my emphasis, 134) Within this diary entry, we see this “collision” that shapes Minnie’s life. Her diary entry starts with the fantasy of window-shopping but ends with the sober reality that her house is cold. Her father is gone, they do not know from where they will get money for coal, and their life is drastically different from the world she knew before the Depression hit. “Fantasy” in Christmas After All functions on both an individual and a social level. Minnie’s journal includes so many popular artistic references to actors, actresses, movies, radio shows, and fashion that fantasy is not the world of individual imagination but rather an alternate universe that exists far-removed from most people’s everyday lives. This cultural “fantasy world” helps people get through rough times, but it cannot ameliorate the harsh reality that ends the passage: “Where will we get enough money for coal?” Yet, ironically, it ultimately does, as the solution to these real world problems lies in fantasy. Minnie’s father earns six-hundred dollars when he sells the script for a radio series entitled Ozzie, the Boy Wonder about “a boy who makes contact with life in space” (145-6). Fiction writing thus materially sustains Minnie and her family, even as it culturally sustains the “collision between realness and fantasy.” Minnie’s “real world” inspires this science-fiction script, since the title character is based on Minnie’s scientifically minded brother Ozzie! So within the fictional world of Minnie’s diary, “real” people prompt fictional characters, who in turn resolve the problem of her harsh reality. Hediger 4 With an outward mirroring effect, Kathryn Lasky, author of Christmas After All, provides us with a “real” writer (Minnie) who reflects on a fiction writer (her father). With these nestled fictional and real worlds, where, then, does the girl-reader of Christmas After All locate reality? Although Minnie is fictional, she is less artificial than Ozzie the Boy Wonder since her diary mirrors what is “real” in her Great Depression life. By identifying this “collision between realness and fantasy,” Minnie positions herself on the side of the “real,” and therefore author Kathryn Lasky positions her on the side of historical verisimilitude. The fictional world thus presents the girl-reader with a “realistic” image of life in the Great Depression, an image that represents historical truth, even as it is imaginary. This interplay exemplifies Hayden White’s scholarship about the connections among narrativity, verisimilitude, and history. White’s argument is useful in understanding how exactly we might conceptualize the relationship between truth and fiction. He first asserts that historic events do not seem real to us unless they are narrated and shown to “poss[ess] a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess mere sequence” (5). When presented this way, the narrative “displays to us a formal coherence to which we ourselves desire” (21). White’s ideas can apply to Kit’s Surprise and Christmas After All, though they are scaled down to the scope of children’s literature. Kit’s and Minnie’s stories are coherent narratives about particular characters in a particular historical time, and they are “desirable” because of their happy resolutions—even if such perfect resolutions never occur in real life, not even for children. We want, according to White, “real events [to] display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary” (24). Kit’s and Minnie’s fictional lives present such an “image of life.” When girl-readers see Kit and Minnie struggle yet ultimately Hediger 5 resolve life issues in a fictional world that, when narrated, seems real, they trust the story, trust the characters, and trust that real life can somehow imitate this fictional image. This “image of life” not only reflects an idea of the past but also presents an image of contemporary life. Parents do not want their girls merely to lose themselves in a story set “once upon a time.” Rather, they want fiction not only to liberate the imagination, but they also want it to have concrete results—values to mimic, keys to solve their own problems, understandings to live better in a changing world. In the imaginary world, Kit can “make anything she wanted to happen happen” (Tripp 48). The series aims to empower girls to be independent, free-thinking, creative females, but it also does not aim to make just “anything” happen. Parents want to instill a certain “image of life.” This parental desire is underscored in “Move Over, Barbie,” the December 3, 2004 cover article of Life magazine’s weekend newspaper supplement (see Image 1). The large, colorful photos show smiling girls hugging their American Girl dolls and serving them tea.i When describing the mission of American Girl, a parent applauds American Girl’s wholesome image of girlhood in contrast to that other Barbie/Britney “image of life”: “‘American Girl builds strength, and it has a good image. I don’t like this Britney Spears’ ” (9). American Girl markets itself to meet this cultural desire of raising a “good” girl, and its books are a key vehicle in achieving this parental goal.ii By fictionalizing reality, adults attempt to control it, because with narrative comes the option to tell a coherent story through which they can “moralize reality” (White 14).