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Regendering the School Story

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Regendering the School Story REGENDERING THE SCHOOL STORY Copyrighted Material CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CULTURE JACK ZIPES, SERIES EDITOR CHILDREN’S LITERATURE COMES IDEOLOGIES OF IDENTITY IN OF AGE ADOLESCENT FICTION Toward a New Aesthetic by Robyn McCallum by Maria Nikolajeva NARRATING AFRICA REDISCOVERIES IN CHILDREN’S George Henty and The Fiction LITERATURE of Empire by Suzanne Rahn by Mawuena Kossi Logan REGENDERING THE SCHOOL STORY TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys Writing for a Dual Audience of by Beverly Lyon Clark Children and Adults edited by Sandra L. Beckett WHITE SUPREMACY IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE TRANSLATING FOR CHILDREN Characterizations of African by Riitta Oittinen Americans, 1830-1900 by Donnarae McCann CHILDREN’S FILMS History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory RETELLING STORIES, FRAMING by Ian Wojcik-Andrews CULTURE Traditional Story and RUSSELL HOBAN/FORTY YEARS Metanarratives in Children’s Essays on His Writings for Children Literature by Alida Allison by John Stephens and Robyn McCallum EMPIRE’S CHILDREN Empire and Imperialism in THE CASE OF PETER RABBIT Classic British Children’s Books Changing Conditions of by M. Daphne Kutzer Literature for Children by Margaret Mackey A NECESSARY FANTASY? The Heroic Figure in Children’s LITTLE WOMEN AND THE Popular Culture FEMINIST IMAGINATION edited by Dudley Jones and Tony Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays Watkins edited by Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark Copyrighted Material REGENDERING THE SCHOOL STORY SASSY SISSIES AND TATTLING TOMBOYS BEVERLY LYON CLARK ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON Copyrighted Material First paperback edition published in 2001 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street NewYork, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Copyright © 1996 by Beverly Lyon Clark Previously published in hardback as vol. 1060 in the Garland Reference Library of Social Science. Ail rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or uti­ lized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 10 9 8765432 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clark, Beverly Lyon. Regendering the school story : sassy sissies and tattling tomboys / Donnarae MacCann. p. cm. Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 0-8153-2116-3 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-415-92891-5 (pbk.) 1. Children’s stories, English-History and criticism. 2. Children’s stories, American-History and Criticism. 3. Education in literature. 4. School children in literature. 5. Gender identity in literature. 6. Children-Books and reading. 7. Feminism and literature. 8. Sex role in literature. 9. Children in literature. 10. Schools in literature. I. Title. II.Series: Garland reference library of social science ; V.1060. III. Series: Garland reference library of social science. Children’s literature and culture series ; v.3. PR830.E38C53 1996 813’.54-dc20 96-19804 CIP Printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paper Manufactured in the United States of America Copyrighted Material CONTENTS VII PREFACE Chapter I I INTRODUCTION Redressing the School Story, Crossgendering a Genre PART I. BEFORE TOM BROWN Chapter z 29 ANXIOUS PROXIES AND INDEPENDENT GIRLS Charles Lamb and Other Early Men Chapter 3 47 THE FIRST TOM BROWN Dorothy Kilner and Other Early Women Chapter 4 63 TELLING TALES ABOUT TELLING TALES E. J. May and Other Talebearers Chapter 5 87 AT MIDCENTURY Mary Martha Sherwood and Other Transitional Women PART II. DURING THE HEYDAY OF THE CANONICAL STORY Chapter 6 103 CROSSING GENDER WITH RACE Edward Everett Hale and Other U.S. Writers Copyrighted Material Chapter 7 131 CROSSING GENDER WITH ETHNICITY Elizabeth Eiloart and Other British Writers Chapter 8 159 SENSATIONALIZING THE SCHOOL STORY Ellen Wood Chapter 9 175 DOMESTICATING THE SCHOOL STORY Louisa May Alcott Chapter 10 197 ENGENDERING THE SCHOOL STORY Julia A. Mathews PART III. IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Chapter 11 229 POLICING THE BORDERS, SATIRIZING THE STATE H. G. Wells and Other Female Impersonators Chapter 12 253 APPROACHING HIGH SERIOUSNESS D. Wynne Willson and Other Recent Women 275 WORKS CITED 293 AUTHOR AND TITLE INDEX vi CONTENTS Copyrighted Material PREFACE I suppose I could blame it all on Alice. For if I hadn’t had a chapter on Lewis Carroll in my dissertation I wouldn’t have gotten to teach Children’s Lit­ erature. And then I wouldn’t have gotten a grant to write a book on the themes of reading and writing in children’s literature. Which book of course never got written. For in the process of investigating this overly ambitious topic I became intrigued by a genre that hadn’t even figured as a chapter in the proposed book, though it should have: the genre of school stories. What I liked about the first school stories I read, canonical stories in the tradition of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was how much they adopted the perspectives of the students as opposed to those of the teachers. How they endorsed peer codes like that prohibiting talebearing and even portrayed plagiarism with surprising forbearance. Leading me to reflect more on my own teaching. But then I started wondering where the girls were. And as I read on, I found that the stories that most piqued my interest, the stories that seemed to be doing the most complex new work, stories like E. J. May’s Louis’ School Days and Richard Johnson’s Little Female Orators, had something in common: they were all crossgendered. What was it about crossgendering— women writing about boys and men writing about girls—that gave play to the contradictions of the genre, contradictions otherwise buried? And why had these school stories been paid so little attention, or when paid atten­ tion, their context in a tradition of school stories ignored? I am grateful to the NEH for a Fellowship for College Teachers, which helped to make early research for this book possible; to the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, for permission to quote from a volume in the Gertrude Stein col­ lection, Adela Quebec’s The Girls of Radcliff Hall; to the John Hay Library, Brown University, for permission to quote from Edward Everett Hale’s Mrs. Copyrighted Material Merriam’s Scholars; to the de Grummond Children’s Literature Research Collection, University of Southern Mississippi, for permission to reproduce an illustration from Elizabeth Eiloart’s Ernie at School; and to the Ameri­ can Antiquarian Society, the British Library, and the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library, for making their collections so generously available. I am also grateful to Sherry O’Brien, Marcia Grimes, and Martha Mitchell of the Madeleine Clark Wallace Library of Wheaton College, for expert assistance with research; likewise Laura Wasowicz of the American Antiquarian Society and Maurice N. Lyon of the Silvio O. Conte Records Center and Regional National Archive; to Patrick Scott for shar­ ing his collection of school stories; to Dee Jones, curator of the de Grummond Children’s Literature Research Collection of the University of Southern Mis­ sissippi; and to Roger Clark, Travis Crosby, Susan Dearing, Elizabeth Keyser, Paula Krebs, Toni Oliviero, Dick Pearce, Steven Strang, Claudia Strauss, Jan Susina, and Cynthia Wells for reading drafts of chapters. I am grateful as well for permission to reprint versions of essays that have appeared elsewhere. Parts of Chapters 1 and 4 appeared as “Cracking the Code of the School Story: Telling Tales About Telling Tales” in Culture and Education in Victorian England, Bucknell Review 34.2 (1990), edited by Patrick Scott and Pauline Fletcher. A somewhat different version of Chap­ ter 9 has appeared as “Domesticating the School Story, Regendering a Genre: Alcott’s Little Men,” in New Literary History 26 (1995): 325-344. viii PREFACE Copyrighted Material I INTRODUCTION REDRESSING THE SCHOOL STORY, CROSSGENDERING A GENRE Critics can no longer assume that important narratives deal with war or whales and that, as Virginia Woolf critiqued their consensus in 1929, “This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a draw­ ing room.” The schoolroom remains another matter. —Mitzi Myers, “The Dilemmas of Gender” The Awakening and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass are now commonly taught in U.S. literature courses, thanks to the current ferment over reconstructing the canon.1 But rare is the adults’ literature course—or anthology—that includes even such acknowledged children’s classics as Little Women or The Secret Garden. Rarer still is any acknowledgment of genres marginalized by the children’s literature establishment—such as the school story. Rarest of all is attention to works marginalized by such a genre—such as boys’ school stories by women and girls’ school stories by men. Yet such marginalized, crossgendered work can give voice to the cultural contradic­ tions that inhabit a genre—and a culture. Such marginal cases “always con­ stitute the most certain and most decisive indices wherever essential condi­ tions are to be grasped” (Derrida, “Limited” 209): one must turn to marginal cases to gain insight into essences, even as one deconstructs those essences. Such transgressive work can reshape and reclaim a genre. Those critics who theorize marginality often address race, gender, class. But not age, not children (and certainly not children’s literature).2 Cora Kaplan, for instance, has brilliantly argued that in the nineteenth century Female subjectivity, or its synecdochic reference, female sexuality, became the displaced and condensed site for the general anxiety about individual behaviour that republican and liberal political philosophy stirred up. It is not too surprising that the morality of the class as a Copyrighted Material whole was better represented by those who exercised the least power within it..
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