Canonical Children’s Literature:

The Literary Quality of Little Women , Anne of Green Gables ,

and The Secret Garden

Sydney Ward

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in the Department of English and American Literatures, Middlebury College

May, 2011

Middlebury College Middlebury, Vermont

2

A woman may perform the most disinterested duties—she may ‘die’ daily in the cause of truth and righteousness. She lives neglected, dies forgotten. But a man who never performed in his whole life one self-denying act, but who has accidental gifts of genius, is celebrated by his contemporaries, while his name and works live on from age to age.

Abba Alcott

3

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter I: Little Women , Anne of Green Gables , and The Secret Garden in Context

Chapter II: Little Women

Chapter III: Anne of Green Gables

Chapter IV: The Secret Garden

Afterword 4

Introduction I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

This quotation is the epigraph for the portion of the Victorian Web dedicated to children’s literature, and it expresses an issue which seems relevant to all those who write about books for children, especially books for girls. Many scholars, defending their subject matter against the double marginalization of being by, for, or about “women and children,” cannot resist the opportunity to sample the representative prejudices associated with those two groups, of which the following is one example:

Girls’ literature performs one very useful function. It enables girls to read

something above mere baby tales, and yet keeps them from the influence of

novels of a sort which should be read only by persons capable of forming a

discreet judgement. (Edward J. Salmon (1886) qtd. in Foster and Simons 1)

The question of the level of the readership’s discreet judgment, or when such judgment need be applied, is not as dated as it would seem. Scholarship on children’s literature prioritizes its ideological, psychological, and cultural implications, and in this sense is still united with the perception that the value of children’s literature is invested in its “function.”

The nineteenth century was as concerned as is the twenty-first in providing positive models of behavior and development for their children. What is interesting about this parallel is that given changing social and moral values, certain books not only survive, but stand out as 5 classics in the canon. What Katy Did , Pollyanna , Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm , and Little Lord

Fauntleroy share many points of comparison with the three paragons of the genre, Little Women ,

Anne of Green Gables , and The Secret Garden , yet their fame remains primarily academic. Were these three books simply more effective at fulfilling their function—educational, ideological, cultural, or otherwise? Much of the existing criticism unintentionally and unconsciously implies this. We can hear this latent argument in comparisons of Little Women with What Katy Did , for example, or The Secret Garden with Little Lord Fauntleroy . The former attributes the endurance of Little Women to its more progressive feminism. The latter explains The Secret Garden ’s greater critical respect as a consequence of its greater psychological accuracy. These books are more acceptable to modern perspectives and consequently their popularity endures, while other books’ popularity is limited to their period of publication.

These valuable criticisms cannot be separated cleanly from the writer’s style, but they betray a clear subordination of the author’s technique to the pedagogical agenda of the critic and audience. The Montgomery scholar Irene Gammel, for instance, in the introduction to her 2010 book Anne’s World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables, notes that “formerly Anne of

Green Gables was presented almost exclusively as a proto-feminist text, as scholars…challenged the literary establishment by demonstrating how L.M. Montgomery had been marginalized as both a children’s writer and a women’s writer” (6). She congratulates these scholars on

“achieving credibility for the author,” enabling her to inaugurate a new generation of scholarly research that need not discuss the novel “exclusively in proto-feminist terms” (7). Gammel writes that the field has “matured” and diversified so much “that ten out of the eleven chapters in this book are concerned with topics that have little to do with Anne’s feminist qualities” (7). In fact, ten out of the eleven chapters in her book are concerned with topics that strictly have little 6 to do with Montgomery’s writing at all. Mostly they address topics like the “Anne-brand” or sociological and psychological interpretations of Anne’s popularity. Gammel is celebrating a

“new century” of criticism which has merely replaced feminism with cultural studies.

There are a few Montgomery critics, however, who focus on her literary technique, even if such a focus is subordinated to the desire to illuminate feminist themes within the text. The cadre of scholars who asserted Montgomery’s claim to the canon as a female writer were, in the words of Gammel, “the first to identify Montgomery’s sophisticated literary techniques (Epperly,

Wilmshurst, Waterston), her use of subversive, double-voiced narration and satire (Rubio), and her layers of subtexts and narrative subtlety (Ahmansson)” (6). Gammel sees their work as the basis for a more mature and diverse body of criticism, but while the cultural considerations surrounding children’s literature are important, they do not exclusively account for the success, impact, or quality of classic books for children.

Even critics like Gammel who can identify the formal qualities in classic books for children that are indistinguishable from those present in “adult literature” privilege readings which address questions of function over style. She sees the work of the early scholars as valuable because they serve the purposes of a feminist critique. The critics she names who have written on the formal qualities of Anne of Green Gables —Elizabeth Epperly, Rea Wilmshurst,

Elizabeth Waterston, Mary Henley Rubio, and Gabriella Ahmansson, whose criticism I will address in Chapter Three—are the minority. For Little Women and The Secret Garden the preponderance of biographical studies, feminist critiques, and cultural studies is even more apparent. Those who do discuss elements like voice usually do so briefly and only in order to explain how it relates to their topic—to discuss point of view in cinematic adaptations, for example, or to argue about relative levels of didacticism in children’s texts. Gammel does 7 perceive, however, that the explication of the formal qualities of their work is necessary for an appreciation of their fiction as classic literature. In order to explain the enduring value of Little

Women , Anne of Green Gables , and The Secret Garden , I would like to return to the texts and analyze the formal qualities which fall under the heading of style.

Faye Riter Kensinger, in her study of the children’s serial, defines style as follows:

What has taken place is that the writer has drawn together and combined a set of

ingredients: characters, plot, some kind of romance, perhaps some humor and

perhaps not, and, in other days, some ‘lesson,’ a moral truth or set of principles.

The way that he has interwoven these ingredients, be that way labored or deft,

comes under the heading of ‘style.’ With the written word, style is a manner of

expression, a way with words, a choosing of phrases and a fitting of them together

in the accomplishment of something not readily visible. Generally, concepts and

perceptions, imagination and originality see first involvement, because good style

needs a basis. At its best it is a distinctive and original enough means of

expression to identify or at least suggest a creator. (142)

This thesis will examine the narrative voice and each author’s most prominent literary techniques. I suspect that most people, when they explain their love for these novels, are unconsciously expressing their appreciation of the author’s voice, so it seems important to account for this crucial dimension of these novels. To demonstrate the centrality of the narrative voice, I will discuss the contemporary as well as the modern reviews of each novel, and because the author’s and protagonist’s voices are intimately connected, I will provide some biographical information about each author. 8

Louisa May Alcott, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Frances Hodgson Burnett published their novels within fifty years of each other. Their periods of publication and the trajectory of their critical reputations mark the beginning of American children’s literature as it is recognized today, as well as the decline of its eminence as a literary genre. Little Women , Anne of Green

Gables , and The Secret Garden have never been out of print and are widely regarded to be classics. These early examples of what is now identified as “girls’ fiction” present three distinct visions of childhood, with heroines who continue to exert their influence on contemporary culture. The style of the three authors, particularly the authorial voice, the realism, and the settings of their novels, relate to one another in complex ways.

All three began their careers young and were motivated in part by financial distress. All three served as teachers and were involved, to a varying extent, in social and political movements of the day, including women’s suffrage. They achieved remarkable success and aspired (at least privately) to literary greatness, writing for both children and adults. All three were beset with family obligations and suffered from ill health and depression, which was attributed to literary overwork. Alcott and Burnett even visited the same female doctor in Boston for the mind cure treatment.

Louisa May Alcott, whose Little Women is openly biographical, grew up in a highly idiosyncratic and even notorious family environment. Scholars speculate on the difficulty of her home life, especially her relationship with her father, Bronson Alcott. Lucy Maud Montgomery was orphaned at three years old and left with her cold maternal grandparents while her father started a new family out west. She married a Presbyterian minister who suffered from religious melancholia, and they had three sons, one of whom died as an infant. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s father died when she was four, and her impoverished family immigrated to the United States. 9

She had two failed marriages, consistent ill health, and suffered the loss of her elder son to tuberculosis.

To a great extent, these authors’ posthumous reputations relied on a single, best-selling novel (for children) that fueled the success of their other works. Louisa May Alcott, chronologically the first author in this study, published the first volume of Little Women , or Meg,

Jo, Beth, and Amy , in October 1868, followed by Part Second in April 1869. Barbara Sicherman, in her study of Alcott’s publishing history, informs us that by the end of 1869 “some 38,000 copies (of both parts) were in print, with another 32,000 in 1870” (633). During the peak of her popularity between 1868 and 1871, Alcott published three books for a juvenile audience, Little

Women (1868-69), An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), and Little Men (1871), which together sold

166,000 volumes (641). By 1888, the year of Alcott’s death, nearly 200,000 copies of Little

Women were in print, and “a notice of her funeral appeared on the front page of the New York

Times ” (Sicherman 633; Clark, Kiddie 106). Louisa May Alcott’s estimated profit between 1868 and 1886 with her publisher Roberts Brothers, “excluding her foreign sales or magazine earnings,” was $103,375 (Sicherman 638).

Domestic sales numbers aside, “In 1893, [Alcott] was second only to Charles Dickens as the novelist whose works were most circulated in U.S. public libraries” (Clark, Kiddie 106). 1

Referred to by Elaine Showalter as “THE American female myth,” Little Women ’s influence on

America is documented in surveys, editorials, and anecdotes of female writers, grown men, politicians, laborers, immigrants, etc. (Haire-Sergeant 136). Even her detractors, among them her father Bronson Alcott’s biographer, ungraciously concede her enormous impact: “ Little Women ,

‘it is fair to say, is beyond the reach of criticism. When a book like this is so loved and

1 Mary Henley Rubio also reports that Montgomery and Dickens “were the ‘most read’ authors in Canada,” according to a 1937 survey from the Montreal Family Herald and Star (Gift 3). 10 cherished—and not merely by the unintelligent—any critic...will be shown the door’” (Clark,

Kiddie 119). According to their mutual publisher Thomas Niles, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s royalties were less than Alcott’s, who received the highest royalties of any Roberts Brothers author (Sicherman 638). 2

Two months after the publication of the first volume of Little Women , eighteen-year-old

Frances Hodgson published her first story in Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine , beginning a lifelong career in which she was never rejected by a publisher (Gerzina, Unexpected Life ix).

She was living in New Market, Tennessee, where she and her family had immigrated at the close of the Civil War and where they almost starved (Gerzina 8-9). She and her sisters industriously took in sewing and opened a school for the neighbors’ children, while her brothers found jobs in a nearby town. Burnett, who described herself as an inveterate storyteller, supplemented their income by writing. She married her neighbor, Swan Burnett, when she was twenty-three, and they lived first in Knoxville, where she had her first son, then in Paris, where she had her second

(and subsequently suffered from depression and mental exhaustion), and then they lived apart as

Frances traveled to produce her plays and publish her stories and Swan tried to maintain a medical practice in Washington. When the couple formally divorced, Burnett alternately lived in

Europe and the United States, supporting her husband and eldest son still in the U.S. Burnett’s fame was established by the publication of Little Lord Fauntleroy , which appeared serially in

1885 and was published in the United States and England in 1886. 3 The story was dramatized, like many of her other works, and was successful on the stage in England, France, and the U.S.

2 The only other female author Nina Baym considers survived the “cultural winnowing” process of the nineteenth century, only to drop out of the canon in the twentieth (Clark, Kiddie 116).

3 Her reputation today depends on the beloved The Secret Garden (1911) and A Little Princess (a work expanded from Sara Crewe after the success of her stage adaptation in 1902), neither of which reached the levels of popularity of Little Lord Fauntleroy while Burnett lived. 11 for many years. Within a year, the book had sold 43,000 copies, and she earned $100,000 from the book sales alone during her lifetime (Carpenter and Prichard 316).

L.M. Montgomery, born in 1874, lost her mother when she was three years old and her father thereafter; he moved west, leaving her with her maternal grandparents and eventually starting another family without her. Her journals reveal that her grandparents were strict and reserved and that her childhood was lonely and deprived of affection. Unlike the determined

Louisa or the extrovert Frances, Lucy “Maud” saw herself as a sensitive child, keenly responsive to beauty and ugliness, highly imaginative, and proud. 4 While Burnett and Alcott published for children as well as for adults, Montgomery is more firmly regarded as a children’s author, a categorization that she attempted to transcend. Nevertheless, her first best-seller and the story for which she is famous, Anne of Green Gables (1908), is regarded as a children’s novel, although many, as with Little Women and The Secret Garden , argue for its status as a cross-generational novel.

While Alcott benefited from her relationship with her publisher whom she credited with giving her the disinterested advice which allowed her to profit from her writing, Montgomery lived to rue the choice of her own. Four major American publishing houses rejected Anne of

Green Gables before the L.C. Page firm in Boston published it in 1908 (Gerson 309). The relationship with Page ended in a lawsuit which resulted in the sale of Montgomery’s copyright for seven novels to Page in 1919 for $17,880 (Gerson 309). At the time, Page was negotiating the sale of the film rights for $40,000, not a penny of which the author received. Unscrupulous,

4 Emily of New Moon , The Story Girl , and Pat of Silver Bush are regarded as the most autobiographical of her novels. Indeed, her heroines are versions of each other, and while Emily, for example, may represent Maud’s ambition, and Pat her domestic self, the two girls are described in similar terms and their thoughts and feelings are almost equivalent. Other heroines who seem to be stand-ins for Maud are Valancy Stirling of The Blue Castle , who seeks an escape from her dreary existence through self-actualization leading to romantic love, and Anne, the lonely child who finds the love and acceptance she hungers for. 12 alcoholic, and mean, Page refused to pay all her royalties and sold reprint rights to other firms without her permission. Despite him, Montgomery enjoyed commercial success. Anne of Green

Gables sold 19,000 copies in the first five months, and before the sale of her copyright to Page,

Montgomery had earned $22,000 for more than 300,000 copies (Gerson 431). Five years after her death, the book had sold between 800,000 and 900,000 copies (Gerson 309). Possibly enjoying an even wider international readership and cult-like popularity than Little Women

(particularly in Poland and Japan), Anne of Green Gables has become an important cultural commodity. Today around 200,000 tourists flock to Prince Edward Island to visit the fabricated village of Avonlea and the Green Gables farmhouse each year (De Jonge 256).

The amazing commercial success of Little Women , Anne of Green Gables , and The Secret

Garden has persisted since their initial publications, and numerous scholars have explored the commercialization of the fictional worlds in each novel, especially in the case of Anne of Green

Gables. Gammel writes, “No other Canadian author has been able to create and sustain an industry that has supported an entire provincial economy for decades through tourism, consumer items, musicals, and films” ( Making Avonlea 3). The power of Anne’s popularity sells more than dolls and postcards; it even commercializes landscape (or protects it, depending on your point of view). Five years before her death, in 1937, “the Prince Edward Island National Park was established to preserve the landscapes her books had made so famous” (Rubio, Gift 3). Today it is one of Canada’s best-known heritage sites (De Jonge 256).

Little Women also maintains a respectable tourist industry, and fans can visit Orchard

House in Concord (along with other famous literary sites) and buy products ranging from “T- shirts and book bags, samplers and sachet dolls, not to mention puzzles, magnets, note cards, 13 posters, diaries, and reproductions of Alcott’s mood pillow” in its gift shop (Clark, Kiddie 103).

This list strongly resembles the one provided by Janice Fiamengo, who writes:

The vast majority of Anne stationary, plates, giftwrap, mousepads, postcards,

books, woodcuts, jigsaw puzzles, lollipops, watercolours, clocks, wallhangings,

birdhouses, and plaques depict the Green Gables house, disconnected from its

particular environment and signifying an intense love of home not dependent on

region or nation. (233)

Fiamengo notices that Anne’s commodification is separate from regional or national identity

(thereby increasing its wide appeal), and that these knick-knacks signify a fictional theme, rather than an actual visit or tangible place. While a study of the commercialization of Anne of Green

Gables is outside the scope of this thesis, I return to Fiamengo’s article on the importance of place in Anne of Green Gables in Chapter Three.

Burnett has not engendered the same intense commercialization except in the land of theater and film. Anne Lundin notes that there are five film versions, dating from 1919 to 1993, and one 1990 stage version. (She also observes that there are “281 different published editions in

English, 70 sound recordings, and 35 visual materials” (287)). Burnett regularly converted her plays into novels and her novels into plays, but Alcott and Montgomery also had a lively film and theater career. (Each novel even has a musical version.) There are five versions of Little

Women , dating from 1917 to 1994. There are four film and television versions of Anne of Green

Gables (excluding the animated television program), dating from 1919 to 1985. Each novel was first a silent film, and each novel also produced a film version in the 1930s after the development of sound technology. Currently their most popular adaptations are their most recent adaptations, produced in the late eighties and nineties (at the peak of the “rediscovery” of these authors’ and 14 their personal writing), but the consistent release of new versions over the twentieth century testifies to their persistent appeal.

The movies are marketed today as family movies, in keeping with the original reception of the novels. During the nineteenth century, literature was produced for “general audiences,” so to speak, and authors like Charles Dickens were read by the entire family. In the twentieth century the perception of popular literature, especially “children’s literature,” changed, and the reading public was increasingly segregated by age and sex. Even when it is not stigmatized as simplistic, children’s literature is regarded as a separate genre with different standards for excellence (in which educational and moral values are prioritized over analyses of formal qualities). Regarded as a method of preparing children for adulthood and for inculcating wholesome lessons, children’s literature is much like baby food (Alcott’s memorable “moral pap for the young”), a nutritious substitute for grown-up food abandoned once a child can chew ( Jo’s

Boys 39).

The derision and dismissal such a perception invites contrasts with the nineteenth century’s reception of children’s literature. Writers could praise the emergence of literature for children without segregating it from adult literature. In her book Kiddie Lit: The Cultural

Construction of Children’s Literature in America , Beverly Clark argues that the genre of children’s literature enjoyed a higher cultural and critical standing in the nineteenth century than it did in the twentieth. The professionalization of the study of literature and the preference given to the masculine and the elite over the feminine and the popular contributed to the marginalization of female authors for children. The nineteenth century representative of

American criticism, William Dean Howells, an exuberant advocate for children’s literature, would be replaced by the likes of Henry James, whose invective usually included words like 15

“immature,” “childish,” “puerile,” “infantine,” and “vulgar.” He had a special dislike, as Clark points out, for “’the reader irreflective and uncritical,’ which is to say, ‘women and children’”

(37).

Prior to the twentieth century, children’s literature enjoyed the same status as other fiction. While one would be unlikely to find the title or author of a children’s book on a late twentieth century list of “The Hundred Best Books,” children’s literature and their reviews often appeared in “serious adult publications”—like Harper’s New Monthly Magazine , the Atlantic

Monthly , the Nation , the Critic , Literary World , and Scribner’s Monthly —at the same time that children’s magazine subscriptions increased (Clark 49). 5 Surveys of readers consistently ranked children’s books highly on lists of “the greatest books.” Indeed, Clark writes:

As Jerry Griswold has pointed out, the best-sellers between 1865 and 1914 were

as likely to be Heidi as Madame Bovary , Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as

Our Mutual Friend. They were in fact more likely to be Little Women than The

Portrait of a Lady , more likely to be Treasure Island than Moby-Dick —more

likely to be Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy than James’s What Maisie Knew .

(48)

In fact the best-sellers between 1875 and 1895 were books for children, at least six out of the top ten (52). Writing for both audiences signified literary success, not just commercial success. Clark quotes from the 1968 essay, “When Majors Wrote for Minors,” in which Henry Steele

Commager argues that, “almost every major writer of the nineteenth century wrote for children

5 In her journal, Alcott recorded her determination to pass the “ Atlantic test” even though she was slightly disdainful of its elitism and valued money more (Clark, Kiddie Lit 110). (She did: five poems and a story were accepted by The Atlantic , which reviewed five of her works.) In addition to the Atlantic Monthly , “ Harper’s Monthly reviewed fifteen of Alcott’s works; the Critic , whose existence overlapped with Alcott’s by only seven years, reviewed eight; the Nation , nine; Literary World , twenty” (Clark 110). 16 as well as for adults, and that for over a century the line between juvenile and adult literature was all but invisible” (Commager 70). Writers, editors, critics, and audience were synchronized in a way they would not be again. The popular was not stigmatized as vulgar and a cross-generational appeal was cultivated instead of eliminated.

While authors were publishing their children’s stories in the elite magazines of the day under editors like Horace Scudder, William Dean Howells, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, they were also submitting to American children’s periodicals. Avery writes that “over 130 juvenile journals were launched between 1840 and 1870, and 105 in the period up to 1900” with contributions from authors including Charles Dickens, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Louisa May

Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Lucretia Hale, and

Mayne Reid and illustrators such as F. O. C. Darley, Winslow Homer, John La Farge, Thomas

Nast, and Courtland Hoppin ( Behold 146-150). The most successful and renowned American children’s periodical, St Nicholas , launched in 1873, circulated the entire English-speaking world. Its first editor, Mary Mapes Dodge, author of Hans Brinker , received contributions from

Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others. Avery writes:

…in the United States every children’s author of any standing at some point wrote

for her. Louisa Alcott’s Eight Cousins and Jack and Jill were serialized there, as

were Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Sara Crewe and Little Lord Fauntleroy , Mark

Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad , Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolboy and

Joel Chandler Harris’s Daddy Jakes the Runaway . Jack London, Noah Brooks,

Howard Pyle, Frank Baum, Frank Stockton,…Hezekiah Butterworth, Palmer Cox,

Laura Richards, Susan Coolidge, Lucretia Hale, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Horace

Scudder and John Trowbridge all wrote for it. ( Behold 151) 17

All in all, the critical environment and commercial market were very receptive to children’s literature. Authors could achieve financial success without being scorned as vulgar hacks; they could write for children without being accused of incompetence.

In the first chapter, I place Little Women , Anne of Green Gables , and The Secret Garden within the context of early children’s reading material, the emergence of the family or domestic genre, and the diminishing critical appreciation of children’s literature. In the second, third, and fourth chapters, I will address the formal qualities of each of these works in relation to one another with a special emphasis on the narrative voice. In Chapter Two, we will see that the initial critical reception of Little Women consistently referenced the power and authenticity of

Alcott’s narrative voice. Chapter Three introduces the critical work of modern Montgomery scholars and the original reviews that analyzed her style, particularly her descriptions of nature.

Chapter Four follows the same structure as the preceding chapters, with an explication of the critical response to The Secret Garden and a discussion of her style, particularly her narrative voice and her symbolic use of nature.

18

Chapter One: Little Women , Anne of Green Gables , and The Secret Garden in Context

The selection of children’s literature available before 1800 is famously sparse. Librarian

Lillian H. Smith “can find only one work [published prior to 1800], Oliver Goldsmith’s Goody

Two Shoes , that has survived to become a children’s classic” (MacLulich 387). Monica Kiefer observes the same deficit in North America:

No period in the history of American juvenile literature is…so bleak and

uninspiring as the first seventy-five years of the eighteenth century. During this

time no real effort was made either in the colonies or in England to provide

suitable reading material for the young. Children everywhere were treated not as

undeveloped beings but as ignorant men and women, and nothing was written

especially for the needs of the immature mind. Instead, little ones were expected

to digest as best they could the heavy literary diets of adults. (7)

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, most children had never “’read from any book save the Bible, a primer, or catechism, and perhaps a hymn book or an almanac,’” a curriculum almost identical in content and range to the one John Locke commented on in 1693 (Kensinger

6-7). In Some Thoughts Concerning Education , Locke laments:

What other books there are in English…fit to engage the liking of Children, and

to tempt them to read, I do not know: But am apt to think, that Children, being

generally delivered over to the Method of Schools, where the fear of the Rod is to

inforce, and not any pleasure of the Imployment to invite them to learn, this sort

of useful Books, amongst the number of silly ones that are of all sorts, have yet

had the fate to be neglected; and nothing that I know has been considered of this 19

kind out of the ordinary Road of the Horn-Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and

Bible. (qtd. in Avery, Behold 31)

Locke, while he wishes to provide engaging reading material suited to a child’s comprehension, still perceives the dearth of appropriate reading material as posing an educational and religious problem. Any fictionalized account concerning or directed to children was written to address the spiritual state of the characters and readers, emerging as it did with the mandate to complement the child’s religious education in a more accessible way. In 1671 James Janeway, a nonconformist English preacher sometimes credited as the first children’s author, published A

Token for Children, Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and

Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (Avery, Behold 31). Janeway’s avowedly factual stories, recounting the deathbed scenes of pious children, were readily welcomed in North

America. Cotton Mather praised and revised Janeway’s “excellent…token” in order “to charm the Children of New England unto the Fear of God with the Exemples of some Children that were exemplary for it…” (Avery, Behold 33).

The discovered utility of “charming the children…unto the Fear of God” remained at least a nominal justification for the increasingly fictional publications directed to the young.

Another explanation identifies the emotive content of the new fiction as a feature of its appeal.

The prevalence of death in early children’s reading seems morbid now, but high mortality rates, especially in childhood, naturally led to an emphasis on eternity and salvation. Likewise, children had never before “featured so prominently in any literary work” and in these stories they were “valued and exalted,” often above adults (Avery, Behold 31-33). The tragic deaths of heroic children excited intense emotions within the narrative and among those reading them, an effect absent from the reading of the catechism or from a child’s daily life. According to Jane 20

Tompkins, tears and melodrama in domestic novels express rage against powerlessness (qtd. in

Foster and Simons 26); likewise, in the pathetic tract fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, emotions are a release empowering the marginalized child.

In the name of morality and corrective education, writers like Mrs. Sherwood, Mrs.

Cameron, and Mrs. Hofland published tales of naughty children and their just rewards (Foster and Simons 5). These stories emphasized the essential sinfulness of children and the suffering attendant on their misdeeds. Lucy Cameron adapted Janeway’s Token for Children “for ‘modern ears’” and published her own tales illustrating the deaths of children, among them The history of

Margaret Whyte; or, The life and death of a good child (Carpenter and Prichard 94). Her more famous sister, Mary Sherwood, is described by The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature as the “most fiercely didactic of all writers of the MORAL TALE” (483), a fact which is unsurprising when one considers this passage she wrote about her early education:

It was the fashion then for children to wear iron collars round the neck, with back-

boards strapped over the shoulders. To one of these I was subjected from my sixth

to my thirteenth year. I generally did all my lessons standing in stocks, with this

same collar round my neck; it was put on in the morning and seldom taken off till

late in the evening; and it was Latin which I had to study! At the same time I had

the plainest possible food; dry bread and cold milk were my principal food, and I

never sat on a chair in my mother’s presence. (qtd. in Carpenter and Prichard 483)

She describes her father, who imposed this discipline, as a very kind man, and declares that she had a very happy childhood. Mrs. Sherwood adapted The Pilgrim’s Progress for an Indian audience and another version entitled The Infant’s Progress from the Valley of Destruction to

Everlasting Glory . Her prolific output includes as many pious deaths as did Janeway’s, including 21 her early story Susan Gray , a hybrid of Clarissa and Pamela , which describes the pious death of a servant girl who rejects her employer’s advances (Carpenter and Prichard 483).

Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), author of the popular The Fairchild Family books and perhaps “’the first English classic writer for children’” belongs to this more severe cast of children’s fiction (Carpenter and Prichard 163). 6 Experience is her preferred teacher, and the more traumatic, the greater the impact. Subjected to corporal punishment and emotional abuse, the children in her stories learn never to quarrel, to lie, or to disobey. 7 In one notorious passage, the father brings his children to view the decaying corpse of a hanged man in order to impress upon them the consequence of familial discord. Taught that “’all [Adam and Eve’s] children…are utterly and entirely sinful: so that of ourselves we cannot do a good thing, or to think a good thought,’” the children are nevertheless expected to uphold adult standards of behavior and religious responsibility (qtd. in Carpenter and Prichard 174). According to

Jacqueline Banerjee, Mrs. Edgeworth and her contemporaries used the deaths of children, or of other innocents (young virgins), with one aim in mind: “to direct her child readers' attention to their own spiritual health” (Banerjee 2). 8 Good children “die serenely,” and bad children “die in

6Maria Edgeworth also published a treatise on the upbringing of children with her father “under the title Practical Education ” (Carpenter and Prichard 163). It is concerned with the utility of children’s reading and upholds “sober perseverance” and the “history of realities” and warns against an injudicious cultivation of the imagination (Carpenter and Prichard 163). Richard Brodhead and others identify Alcott as the first children’s author to truly focus on the pleasure of being a child rather than religious salvation or correct behavior. Montgomery most famously established the imagination as a precious faculty, and Burnett was a vocal advocate for the development of the child’s imagination. All three authors celebrated their heroines’ ability to cope with reality through creativity.

7 One of the milder punishments the children suffer is isolation; they are not to be spoken to or acknowledged by the rest of the family. This punishment appears in the work of L.M. Montgomery in at least two of her autobiographical novels of childhood, Pat of Silver Bush and Emily of New Moon , where its effect upon a sensitive child is described as morbidly cruel and emotionally damaging. The subject of childhood discipline figures most prominently in Montgomery’s work, especially punishment through the imposition of mental distress. In Anne of Green Gables , Marilla forces Anne to walk through the “haunted wood” to cure her of her imagination. In an emotionally charged scene from Emily of New Moon highly reminiscent of Jane Eyre , the unsympathetic Aunt Elizabeth banishes her terrified niece to the dreaded room where her grandfather died. Adult callousness and cruelty revealed through their treatment of children is famously developed by Dickens, a favorite author of all three women.

22 agony” (Banerjee 2). The use of children as “spiritual guides” in literature operates in these largely Calvinistic works by provoking fear of damnation and a desire for righteousness

(Banerjee 1). Children will continue to serve as spiritual guides well into the Victorian Era, but their essence is expressive rather than repressive.

Sentimentalism and the Death of Children

Gillian Avery writes in her book Behold the Child : “One might guess that Dickens, when he came to describe the deaths of Paul Dombey and Little Nell, remembered something of the emotion he had felt as a child reading tracts about the deaths of children who, unlike him, were admired and valued” (34). In Dickens’ stories the saintly child serves as a spiritual guide and pathetic trope, but also as social critique. Like Blake’s chimney sweeper, the child-victim functions to excite our pity and indignation and to direct that emotion toward a social cause.

Banerjee argues that “the Romantic ideal of the innocent child, and the Evangelical ideal of the saved child as a spiritual guide, reinforce each other,” operating on personal and social levels (1).

The child provides the individual an avenue for personal reform, while condemning societal negligence and cruelty. The deaths of children or of other innocents—as in Clarissa (Banerjee 2) or Tess of the D’Urbervilles —is brought around by the corruption of their condition and those around them, and presages other fallen women and children of American naturalism, like

Stephen Crane’s Maggie . These deaths varied from the sordid to the idealized, expressing optimism or pessimism on the potential for redemption, but despite their differences, these deaths were instructive, largely through contrasting purity with baseness and exciting sympathy. 9

8 The traditional conflation of women with children is especially relevant when discussing the evolution of girls’ fiction. The maturation of the female heroine is often followed from girlhood through adolescence. Adolescence was not a recognized stage of growth, and this crucial period and its indeterminacy—is the “girl” a child or a woman—occupies a significant amount of children’s, juvenile, and adult fiction.

9 Comparing The Secret Garden to Jane Eyre and Great Expectations , Phyllis Bixler observes, “Miss Havisham’s Satis House, Edward Rochester’s Thornfield Hall, and Archibald Craven’s Misselthwaite Manor are all patrimonial 23

The child used as a vehicle for spiritual instruction, social change, or pathos is not always one-dimensional. Even the writers of moral tales developed personal styles and wrote with “a good ear for natural dialogue” and created characters made of “flesh-and-blood” (Carpenter and

Prichard 163). Indeed, Maria Edgeworth’s popularity (at least in abridged versions) lasted through the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth, influencing such authors as Beatrix

Potter and E. Nesbit (Carpenter and Prichard 163-4).

In spite of their differences, the severe, sober literature of the early authors meets the elevated, idealized, and tearful literature of the later period around the deathbed. The suffering and death of innocents provoked an emotional response that served the need for pathos and the desire for consolation. Ultimately, readers and their authors were dealing with death as a personal problem, not just a social phenomenon, a literary trope, or a religious example. The sentimentalism of writers from this period, especially female authors, addressed the need to reconcile human suffering with the divine will. The most famous American examples of girls- too-good-for-earth, the “Angels in the House,” are Little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Beth

March from Little Women . Alcott, who was writing from life, exemplifies this portrayal of death as a personal matter as opposed to a literary construct. She is more insistent on the theme of grief than of social or even personal reform. 10

Nevertheless, Beth and her death are romanticized, and it is this idealization of death which permeates and informs children’s literature through the early twentieth century. There

mansions with large unused portions and ghostly hidden residents”; in Bronte’s and Dickens’ novels, these houses prove irredeemable and must be destroyed (along with their ghostly hidden resident). Pointing out the distinction between “happy endings” in adult and children’s fiction, Bixler observes that only in The Secret Garden do the house and grounds transform with the characters (“Gardens” 296).

10 Nevertheless, she certainly maximized its dramatic potential. John Seelye, in his book Jane Eyre’s American Daughters , remarks that Beth’s death is perhaps the best death in this tradition, because it lasts for two volumes and happens off-stage (180). He seems to be partially facetious and partially sincere, but his assessment identifies both the sentimental side of Alcott’s fiction and the literary restraint that tempers it. 24 were exceptions, most famously from the Brontë sisters. Helen Burns in Jane Eyre submits to death and the divine will, but her example does not elicit a similar resignation from Jane

(Banerjee 4). Unlike fiction where the death of the saintly character transforms death into something beautiful, even desirable, Helen’s death strengthens Jane’s resolve to survive

(Banerjee 4). Anger, rather than cathartic grief or inspiration, infuses the text. In Wuthering

Heights, Emily Brontë chooses to reject the idealization of physical suffering and consequent mental purification entirely (Banerjee 2). With Linton Heathcliff she shows “a young invalid's tyranny, and a far from graceful decline from pettishness to moroseness and apathy. It was only much later, with Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden , that such realities would be squarely faced again” (Banerjee 2). 11 By the time of The Secret Garden ’s publication, the fictional death toll had decreased, but the centuries of death and the tradition of its centrality in books with or for children continued to exert its influence, if in less direct and dramatic ways.

Instead, the body, not the spirit, receives growing emphasis. Alcott, who served briefly as a nurse during the Civil War, and whose literary alter ego Jo nurses the invalid sister Beth, expounds in Little Women and in her other books upon the importance of exercise, work, and healthy living. 12 L.M. Montgomery, whose child characters do sometimes perish in saintly ways, also establishes the need for outdoor exercise and nourishment. 13 In her books illness figures more frequently than in Little Women , and consumption, scarlet fever, typhoid, whooping cough, heart disease, blindness, and broken bones all make their appearance. Burnett’s health regime is the most deliberately proscribed of them all, and in addition to the benefits of exercise and

11 The overtones of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in The Secret Garden are immediately apparent: the plain, unloved Mary Lennox travels to a lonely manor on the moor, haunted by the sound of the wind and a voice crying and tenanted by a moody man thwarted in love and his hidden invalid son.

12 See Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom

13 See Pat of Silver Bush for a “Beth” equivalent. The character’s name is also Elizabeth, shortened to “Bets.” 25 nutrition, she makes explicit the connection between the child’s psychic and physical health.

Alcott and Montgomery also establish this connection, but for Burnett, one cannot be healthy and strong without acknowledging and nurturing the unity of the mind and body. The health of the body and the health of the spirit are central to her story in ways which resonate with her personal life. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, her biographer, suggests that The Secret Garden served as a therapeutic outlet for her grief over the death of her older son, which allowed her to write herself a happier ending. Some believe that this explains Mary’s disappearance from the latter part of the book and Colin’s emergence as the protagonist. As with Beth in Little Women , Colin’s invalidism, though imaginary, correlates with the author’s own experience.

Reading Adult Fiction: Classics, the Domestic Tradition, and Conspicuous Consumption

In addition to collections of fairy tales, Mother Goose rhymes, travel stories, Pilgrim’s

Progress , and histories like Plutarch’s Lives or Irving’s Washington , children were also exposed to their parents’ fiction and poetry. Dickens’ stories, along with the works of other novelists and poets such as Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Scott, Longfellow, Melville, and Tennyson were appropriated by children, or at least available to them, in the absence of a discrete mature literature of their own. The demarcation between “child” and “adult” had not appeared in publishing; instead, fiction was a family genre. The rising cultural consumption of an increasingly literate and national middle class introduced greater access to books and serialized fiction, contributing to a social appreciation of literature that involved whole families, towns, and nations.

After 1850 when the American publishing industry “took off,” over 90 percent of the adult white population was literate (Sicherman, “Middle-Class Identity” 141). The production and distribution of magazines and books increased, leading to intense competition and 26 introducing a variety of genres to the American public, including “essays, history, travel, biography, and… fiction” (Sicherman, “Middle-Class Identity” 141). There was a reduction in the price of books, which circulated through libraries, societies, and friends, as well as through the commercial market. Professionalization of the middle class and the increase in incomes allowed families to organize themselves into genteel households, where mothers attended to their domestic duties and the education of the children. The children had access to public and private education and enjoyed a longer childhood and youth before marriage. With their disposable incomes, families devoted time and funds to leisure activities and the acquisition of cultural signifiers. Cultural literacy became an important feature of middle-class family life, and in a society without other forms of private entertainment and instruction, reading constituted a regular, communal activity for the entire household. Barbara Sicherman, in her essay “Reading and Middle-Class Identity in Victorian America,” points out that reading possessed an iconic significance born out in the “numerous paintings depicting scenes of reading” and “images of fathers reading by the fireplace” (140).

Sicherman also argues that the voracity and eagerness with which the American middle class responded to the availability of cheaper and more varied reading material indicates a fundamental shift in the perception of reading. Formerly, reading was considered scholarly and vocational, rather than recreational and entertaining. Now an increasingly wealthy and literate middle class was seeking material beyond sermons and classical histories, and they were seeking it partially as a means to construct or solidify identity. She explains that “a reverence for culture was replacing an older religious sensibility,” and the novel, rather than the sermon, was regarded

“as the principal shaper of culture” (142-143). She writes: 27

For a middle class moving away from a tightly bounded evangelical religion,

Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture as ‘a pursuit of our total perfection by

means of getting to know…the best which has been thought and said in the world’

offered values, certainties, and possibilities of transcendence once found in

religion. (142-143)

The need to produce moral books for family audiences naturally led to the family novel, described by Frank Luther Mott in his 1947 book Golden Multitudes: The Story of Bestsellers in the United States as comprising “homely characters and incidents, pathos, humor, a love affair within or without the family, a touch of melodrama when the sophisticated outside world impinges on the moral security of home life, growing pains of children, [and] love of the family circle” (215-216). He mentions many of the authors who will be discussed here or who form part of the early girls’ literary canon: Alcott and Montgomery; Susan Warner, author of The Wide,

Wide World ; Kate Douglas Wiggin, author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm ; Gene Stratton

Porter, author of Girl of the Limberlost ; Alice Hegan Rice, author of Lively Mary ; Eleanor H.

Porter, author of Pollyanna ; and Jean Webster, author of Daddy-Long-Legs .14

In addition to these family novels, other fiction by women for women often found its way into youthful female hands, including Catharine Mary Sedgwick’s A New England Tale

(1822), Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), Maria Cummins’ The Lamplighter

(1854), Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856), and Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore

(1893). 15 These books present the traditional pattern of sentimental fiction wherein a heroine

14 Some family novels unmentioned in this source, but frequently referenced in others are What Katy Did , the Little Colonel series by Annie Fellows Johnston, Gypsy Breynton by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps , and the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

15 Avery accords Sedgwick particular attention in her study of the American heroine, arguing that she has been “overlooked” (Avery, “Remarkable and Winning” 12). 28 comes to maturity through suffering and the submission of self to the will of others and God.

When they came to write their books, Alcott, Montgomery, and Burnett were creating their protagonists in a culture of many oppressed and repressed tearful girl-women seeking salvation, whose authors focus primarily on the achievement of young womanhood and less on the condition of childhood. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, readers had access to fiction with girl heroines and with a focus on childhood, rather than on the religious journey of maturation and submission popular in domestic fiction. These young protagonists dominated the children’s serial.

The Children’s Serial: History, Popular Authors, and Child Protagonists

While there was an emphasis in the nineteenth century on family fiction, the publishing industry also targeted specific groups. The Sunday School libraries and tract society publications circulated and produced stories for children. In addition to their school primer, rhymes, fairy tales, and the occasional book, usually Pilgrim’s Progress or Gulliver’s Travels , children began to have access to stories produced exclusively for them. Cheap production and distribution methods and increasing literacy contributed to the popularity and dissemination of periodicals during the nineteenth century, and publishers began to capitalize on the unrealized market for children’s literature. The demand for reading material was such that even the American Sunday

School Union’s Youth’s Friend and Scholar’s Magazine , containing religious essays and anecdotes, reached a public of 10,000 in 1827, and two years later a journalist reported that “the mania for periodicals has extended itself to children” (Kensinger 12). Between 1802 and the beginning of the Civil War, seventy-five journals were started (Avery, Behold 146), among them the well-respected The Youth’s Companion (1827-1929) and Merry’s Museum for Boys and Girls 29

(1841-1870s). 16 Harriet Christy’s survey of American children’s periodicals classifies them by period:

(1) 1789-1840, the period of didacticism, with religious themes dominating the

writing; (2) 1840-60, when there was less emphasis on morality and religion and

more emphasis on sentimentality, materialism and escapism; (3) post-Civil War,

when reading for the enjoyment of reading predominated, still with its emphasis

on proper living, however. (121)

The categories succinctly describe the trends identified in the previous sections: the earliest serials emphasize religious and educational content; some introduce the evangelical child, by whose living and dying example adults repent and convert; others depict the child as an individual whose character must be molded; and progressively, the focus moves from religion to sentimentalism to enjoyment. Christy emphasizes the permeability of these boundaries and states that these categorizations are intended to guide interpretation, not to limit it. Little Women , for example, was undoubtedly influenced by the period immediately preceding its publication in its emphasis on material concerns and its moral and sentimental components.

While Little Women was not published serially, much of the first American children’s literature came in the form of serials, usually religious or educational, but the level of didacticism evolved over the century. Jacob Abbott (1803-1879), author of the Rollo books and the Franconia series, earned the title “father of the story series” (Carpenter and Prichard 36). A teacher by profession, Abbott’s Rollo Books follow the education of young Rollo to adulthood in twenty-eight volumes. His “mild” writing style treated children as equals and challenged them to think, and his educational philosophy emphasized the importance of learning by experience

(Kensinger 36). Another contemporary, Samuel Goodrich, under the pseudonym Peter Parley,

16 Alcott contributed to this magazine and served as its editor around 1867-68. 30 produced educational narratives of history, geography, natural science, and biography in a

“homely, chatty style” that privileged information over character development (Carpenter and

Prichard 212). 17 Other prolific and notable serial authors of the early and mid-nineteenth century include William Taylor Adams (1822-1897), known as Oliver Optic, and Horatio Alger (1832-

1899). While contemporaneous with Abbott and Goodrich, Optic and Alger pursued narrative styles much more fantastic and extravagant. The Optic and Alger style would replace the measured, simple mode of Abbott, and the children’s serial, particularly the boy’s serial, would become a plot-driven adventure story. Edward Stratemeyer, creator of the Rover Boys series, capitalized on this trend in children’s writing, and founded a syndicate of over fifty writers who would produce stories on demand under different pseudonyms. The Stratemeyer Syndicate survived under his children and is responsible for such series as The Bobbsey Twins , Tom Swift ,

The Hardy Boys , and Nancy Drew .

The publishing industry’s intense capitalization of the market for children’s literature contributed to the immense output of the early twentieth century. Publishers, even those who did not farm out plot lines to ghost authors, pressured their writers to create stories that could be milked for all they were worth. Alcott’s and Montgomery’s frustration with sequels to their big hits is well-documented. Children naturally seek continuity and repetition, and the children’s serial fulfilled this need, some with greater depth and ability than others. Some of the best-loved children’s stories are serials, including L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz series; Edgar Rice

Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes ; Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle stories; Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer books; Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers and How They Grew ; and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s

Little House series. The less recognizable titles include Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore series,

17 He edited Parley’s Magazine and founded the periodical Merry’s Museum , which Alcott would later edit. He also solicited Nathaniel and Elizabeth Hawthorne for submissions (Carpenter and Prichard 212-3). 31

Susan Coolidge’s accounts of the Carr family, Annie Fellows Johnston’s Little Colonel series,

Wiggins’ Rebecca series, Porter’s Pollyanna , Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Gypsy Breynton books, and Booth Tarkington’s Penrod Schofield, “the worst boy in town,” a rival for Twain’s Huck

Finn and George Peck’s Bad Boy .

Faye Riter Kensinger examines the characteristics of the form in her book Children of the

Series . She identifies the orphan as one of its most popular figures and the emerging demarcation between girls’ and boys’ books. The orphan as protagonist was appealing not only because this reflected reality to some extent, but also because the orphan afforded the “most adverse position” in society and therefore the greatest potential for sympathy and advancement (70). Kensinger explains the type as:

…valiant children of sharp sensibilities, endowed with the will to persevere, and

the character to attain some small height. With them there was only one direction

to proceed, and that was upward. Adversity, a condition offering challenge and

demanding vanquishment, fostered spirit, ambition and self-development... (72-

73).

Hence the popularity of Horatio Alger and his rags-to-riches street urchins. This type extended into the later series for boys who did have parents, even though they were usually sparsely supervised. The boy hero, even as orphan, possessed “independence or enterprise,” and “did not rate or need tender sympathy” (71-72). The stories emphasized upward mobility rather than loneliness and helplessness. A boy had greater latitude, “participated in bold expedition, ventured abroad by any means of transportation, committed errors, employed slang, and spoke his opinion unasked” (71-72). 32

A girl’s behavior was more circumscribed. Her power was spiritual rather than material

(Foster and Simons 7). Her character had to appeal to the sympathies in order to achieve an improvement in her condition. More dependent on others, she had to please others, and this led to an emphasis on self-improvement. The girl’s action was directed inward, and her character acts upon others through a gentle, invisible web of influence. The boys impose their personalities upon the world and change their conditions by compelling others to acknowledge their worth and reward them. For boys and girls the redemption from neglect or obscurity is satisfying, but it is achieved in very different ways. Kensinger identifies “the big three” from the female orphan tradition to demonstrate. Anne, Rebecca, and Pollyanna “transcended other wistful nobodies and endeared themselves to readers along with coveys of like creatures brought to life by means of pen and ink to elicit sentiments of compassion” (80). Not the unhappy, pious, and beautiful heroines who suffer through countless injustices and oppressions, these girls have resilient spirits and indomitable personalities. Their unconventionality is part of their appeal. They do not have to be beautiful, well-behaved, self-sacrificing, or talented. They are unique and possess a rich inner life of imagination and creativity.

Meanwhile, the boys enacted “bold and free conflicts with dashing action, startling turns of contests, close succession of exploits with pauses too brief for brooding or reasoning or evaluation” (96). Their “undertakings demanded audacious action, the more accelerated and the more complex, the better. Thus the plot must be primary and the characters secondary” (96).

What characterization there was confined itself to describing “general qualities of leadership, stamina, some kind of loyalty to the group, and blurred good looks.” The boy hero “built up small heroics with successions of incidents, outrages, mysteries and contests…. Events built up to peaks of suspense and some kind of triumph” (95). Kensinger concludes that with the boys, 33

“life was action and reality and the primary senses. With the boys it was often a matter of see and touch, set out and conquer. Living was more upon the surface, and when there came a pitting of wits, the jousting was not profound” (151).

Kensinger restricts her commentary to the children’s serial, and her intent is to articulate a formula for the general type. Her criticism is usually harshest for those authors guilty of sensational and “mediocre writing,” or of sentimentalism, narrow-mindedness, and extravagance

(156). Her approval generally goes to those authors who distinguish themselves from the type and who create believable characters with humorous and relatively realistic exploits. Her observations on the relative importance of plot, character development, and personal or family relationships explicate the environment in which characters like Jo, Anne, and Mary are received. Jo, in many ways the girl who longs to be in a boys’ serial, is celebrated for her unconventionality, her rebellion against gender norms, her creativity and ambition. Little

Women , while it does not fit the archetype of the orphan story, emphasizes the four sisters’ individuality, their personal development, and their relationships. Anne, as has been noted, conformed to Kensinger’s description of the orphan type. Mary is her antithesis. In forty years,

Alcott, Montgomery, and Burnett transformed the fictional image of girlhood in America in ways which still influence authors today. Lastly, Kensinger addresses the importance of the formal qualities in books for children as she sketches the history of the children’s serial. The intense commercialization of the early twentieth century resulted in a market of indifferently written adventure stories and formulaic plots; sometimes many different authors even wrote for the same series. This lack of distinctiveness only highlights the dangers of attributing too much importance to the function of children’s literature—its educational value, ideological messages, 34 its archetypal plot or characterization—and of paying too little attention to the way in which these stories are told.

Changes in Critical Esteem: From the Nineteenth to the Twentieth-Century

Lofting [author of Dr. Dolittle] despised the term “Juveniles,” considering it an epithet, and declared that there ought to be a classification of “Seniles” to balance it. The idea of setting off children as “a separate species” irritated him. “For who shall say where the dividing line lies, that separates the child from the adult?” he asked. “Practically all children want to be grown up and practically all grown-ups want to be children, and God help us, the adults, when we have no vestige of childhood in our hearts.” Faye Riter Kensinger, Children of the Series

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grownup, to admire the grownup because it is grownup, to blush at the suspicion of being childish—these things are the mark of childhood and adolescence. C. S. Lewis, quoted in The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature

Beverly Clark, in the introduction to her collection of the contemporary reviews of

Alcott’s works, observes that “it is a surprise, for twenty-first century scholars, to see how widely reviewed—and appreciated—Alcott’s works were. We are accustomed to a sharp segregation between literature for adults and that for children (and the reviews thereof)…” (xv).

In the nineteenth century writers for children were published and reviewed by prestigious magazines like the Atlantic Monthly , the Nation , the Critic , Literary World , Harper’s Monthly

Magazine , and Scribner’s , and a cross-generational audience signaled a writer’s talent and ability. William Dean Howells was a staunch advocate for children’s literature, including literature for girls, along with the other two editors of the Atlantic between 1871 and 1898,

Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Horace Scudder (Clark, Kiddie 55). All three men published significant literature for children, and as late as the 1890s, “the editor of Harper’s claimed to print nothing ‘that could not be read aloud in the family circle’” (Clark, Kiddie 49). The influence of Victorian domesticity and the emphasis on the rising middle-class family with 35 cultural aspirations afforded children’s literature an esteemed position in the critical hierarchy.

According to Clark, “The boundary between literature for children and that for adults was fluid in the nineteenth century,” and the designation “children’s literature” did not invite the opprobrium it received in later years ( Reviews xv-xvi). Books written for children were marketed to adults, and vice-versa , and the general audience of such classics as Little Women and Little

Lord Fauntleroy was adult as well as juvenile. In her dissertation American Girl to New Woman:

Themes of Transformation in Books for Girls, 1850-1925 , Lin Haire-Sergeant writes about the

“huge public audiences” for books like Anne of Green Gables and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm , claiming that in the early twentieth-century, “everyone, of all ages and both genders, knew about

Rebecca and Anne” (153-4).

The enormous popularity and high estimation of these books is hard to convey to twenty- first century readers who are accustomed to regarding them as “classics” of the lower-case variety, books that are loved but not treated with the reverence bestowed upon the American

Masters. Indeed, efforts to convey the magnitude of the public esteem for these works is often distilled to us through the words of recognized (masculine) authorities. Every Anne scholar (or anyone who has read the back of certain editions) is familiar with Mark Twain’s praise of “the dearest and most moving and delightful child in fiction since the immortal ‘Alice,’” just as

Wiggin followers know that Jack London positively gushed over precocious Rebecca (qtd. in

Rubio, Gift 355; Seelye 301). 18 Scholars tote up the number of prime ministers and presidents

18 It is notable that these examples are of men who have written for children, but who are not usually classed with children’s authors. Similarly, Twain’s reference to Alice and the quotations at the beginning of the section from Hugh Lofting and C. S. Lewis draw attention to male writers for children and their relative position within the canon. Writers like Carroll, Kipling, Stevenson, Twain, Lewis, Tolkien, and White, to name a few, seemed to have escaped the greater part of the stigma of writing for children. They are afforded greater critical respect than their female counterparts and their works are less likely to be dismissed as simple children’s fiction. Lewis even felt confident enough to defend his genre, something neither Alcott nor Montgomery were willing or able to do. 36 who commended and flattered their scribbling women. (Alcott, Montgomery, and Burnett total at least four U.S. presidents and Canadian and British prime ministers.)

Clark, as part of her study of the “cultural construction of children’s literature,” attempts to illustrate their popularity through collective testimony. Of Alcott she writes:

In 1871 Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl were the most popular books in

the largest US lending library; in 1893 only Charles Dickens’ novels were more

circulated than Alcott’s in US public libraries. In 1947 Frank Luther Mott lists

Little Men as one of the three best sellers of 1871 and Little Women as one of the

21 best sellers in US history. (Clark, Contemporary xvi)

She observes that “When Alcott died, in 1888, a notice of her funeral appeared on the front page of the New York Times ,” and a 1928 news headline “names only Alcott: ‘To preserve Alcott home’—the home being not Orchard House, the one now most associated with her, but Hillside, later called Wayside, and now more associated with Hawthorne” ( Kiddie 106-7). A later reviewer for the New Yorker even argued that “Alcott ‘may be the most widely read transcendentalist today’”—at least, not under compulsion ( Kiddie 105). Lastly, Clark notes:

It’s characteristic that in the first edition, in 1909, of the Children’s Catalog: A

Guide to the Best Reading for Young People Based on Twenty-Four Selected

Library Lists , a volume that catalogued three thousand books, Alcott is accorded

twenty-three entries—compared to three for Twain, twelve for Dickens, and three

for Lewis Carroll. ( Kiddie 107)

Yet whether one tries to demonstrate the literary significance of Little Women , Anne of Green

Gables , and The Secret Garden through the testimony of one person or many, the intention remains the same: to establish a critical basis for the appreciation of girls’ literature. 37

Catherine R. Stimpson, in her essay “Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March,” addresses five possible reasons for Little Women ’s “loss of critical currency,” what Clark would more polemically call the exclusion of girls’ literature, specifically Little Women , from the canon. Both Stimpson and Clark develop two of these reasons at length. Stimpson provides a summary:

1. The shelving of Little Women as children’s literature (however, in a self-

contradictory move inseparable from the trashing of a commitment to women,

was the bestowing of honor upon some children’s literature, especially upon some

‘boy’s books’).

2. Finally, as Jane Tompkins shows, a snubbing of popular texts, because popularity

seemed, a priori, incompatible with the rigors of interpretive strategists. 19 (594)

Stimpson argues that there is a “routine” distinction between “a book that gives pleasure and a book that has merit” and “between the text that provokes official respect and the text that provokes unofficial love” (588). Many people in successive generations may love and praise a book without its admission to the official canon. Stimpson contends that the root of this paradox is the gap between love and power. She writes:

The middle managers of culture have edited feeling from criticism. So doing,

we/they have also replicated the ideological and social division between a formal,

rational, public domain (yes, masculine) and an informal, emotional, private

domain (yes, feminine) that is a feature of modernity. Such polarities are

commensurate with a gap between high and popular culture. (589)

19 I have altered the numbering for the purposes of clarity. In the original essay, what I have listed as number one is number three, and what I have listed as number two is number five. 38

The purpose of Clark’s study is to map the transition from a nineteenth-century mentality that embraced feeling to a twentieth-century formalized criticism that rejected women, children, popularity, and domestic values. To do this she compares the critical reputations of Burnett and

Henry James, and to a lesser extent, Alcott and Twain.

Clark identifies Burnett and James as the authors who typify the shift in the reception of children’s literature at the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Eight years apart in age, the two authors in effect switched places with one another, Burnett leaving her native England for America, James going in the other direction. Burnett achieved success in her stage plays and fiction, while James, “failing to achieve great popularity, focus[ed] more and more on an elite audience, one that would increasingly acknowledge him as the

Master” ( Kiddie 33). For a time they were even neighbors in England and saw one another socially, and while Burnett could praise him to her son Vivian as a “gentleman” of “fine and kind” instincts, he was nasty in his reviews, calling her “a fatally deluded little woman” and declaring that her writing “made one blush for the human mind” (qtd. in Clark, Kiddie 32).

Repeating the pejoratives he used so frequently in his reviews, he wrote of one of her plays: “[It] would be infantine if infants ever expressed themselves in falsetto,” and “It would be unfair to criticize it seriously, it is so very primitive an attempt at dramatic writing” (32).

As a critic he sought to purify literature of the contaminating influence of women, popularity, children, anything that he perceived diminished its seriousness. 20 He often complained that the novels he reviewed seemed to be “written for children” or were “almost

20 He exempted Robert Louis Stevenson from his censure. Indeed, he argues that it is “a perverse humility” that maintains “the fiction that a production so literary as Kidnapped is addressed to immature minds” (qtd. in Clark 37). Stevenson’s treatment of “the idea (the idea of a boy’s romantic adventures), becomes a matter of universal relations” (qtd. in Clark 36). Stevenson’s juvenile fiction “’embraces every occasion that it meets to satisfy the higher criticism’” (qtd. in Clark 36). These remarks resemble others that compare boyhood experiences to universal truth, whereas girls’ experience is limited and not “literary.” 39 always addressed to young unmarried ladies,” and were “stupid” and “dull” (qtd. in Clark,

Kiddie 35). Perhaps like Nathaniel Hawthorne before him, he imagined that the “damn’d mob of scribbling women” diverted the attention of the public from his superior writing, and his response was to condemn both the popular and the feminine. 21 Burnett was receiving more positive critical and popular attention than James. Clark writes:

In 1883, a critic in the London Quarterly Review claimed that Burnett had ‘given

the world the best American novels of the present day.’ The reviewer was

explicitly comparing her work, pre-Fauntleroy , with that of Henry James, to his

“Daisy Miller” and The Portrait of a Lady , lamenting the ‘philosophic instruction

and dawdling sentimentality’ of the James stories. ( Kiddie 32)

Ten years later “the readers of the Critic voted Little Lord Fauntleroy one of the forty ‘greatest’ books ‘yet produced in America, or by Americans’: it ranked thirty-third, behind Little Women but ahead of Tom Sawyer , Huckleberry Finn , and anything by Henry James, none of whose works appeared on the list” (Clark, Kiddie 18).

What produced such a radical shift in the critical reception of these authors’ works?

Stimpson and Clark both cite Nina Baym’s 1981 essay “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How

Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” in which Baym contends:

In pursuit of the uniquely American, [critics] have arrived at a place where

Americanness has vanished into the depths of what is alleged to be the universal

male psyche. The theory of American fiction has boiled down to the phrase in my

title: a melodrama of beset manhood. (139)

21 Nina Baym points out that women authors, “commercially and numerically…have probably dominated American literature from the middle of the nineteenth century,” when Hawthorne was writing (124). His bitterness survived in James, who sneeringly compared Burnett to Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, perhaps the most widely read nineteenth- century novelist, according to Baym. 40

In her essay she argues that the professionalizing literary elite, in a move to separate American literature from the English canon, established the myth of man against society as the paradigm of

American literary excellence. Such a myth inherently excludes women, who are aligned with society against the individual. Even women authors who did write of the individual’s conflict with society were not canonical writers; they wrote merely of “female experience,” which, evidently, is not universal the way male experience is. The process of constructing a literary canon was one of distinguishing between the male and the female, thought and feeling, the nineteenth and the twentieth century, and the High and the Low.

Clark illustrates this process with her example of Burnett and James. As the critics turned from the popular and the female to the elite and the masculine, popular female authors were denied entry to the canon.

…Around the turn of the century, what was considered literary shifted from the

kind of practice epitomized by Frances Hodgson Burnett to the kind epitomized

by Henry James. At a time when women and children were increasingly conflated

in the critical imagination, Burnett addressed both. And estimates of her work

plummeted. James disdained both, in his criticism at least…. Estimates of his

work soared. ( Kiddie xii)

This divergence is evident also in the critical reputations of Alcott and Mark Twain. Today Mark

Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered an adult classic, while Alcott’s Little

Women is usually relegated to the children’s shelf. At the time of their publications, this was not the case. Little Women was immensely popular and Alcott’s critical reputation was comparable to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s. Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were considered children’s fiction and did not achieve the huge public audiences and high critical regard of 41

Alcott’s works. Yet Little Women , unlike Huck Finn , is a story about girls who accommodate, to a significant extent, the demands of society. Critics searching for the “quintessentially American work” according to Baym’s model, would turn from the domestic, female experience of Alcott’s

Little Women to the escapist boyhood adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Clark writes:

Forget that Alcott was never an expatriate—never spent the better part of a decade

or more outside the United States, as did James and Twain. Forget that she

provided a window on the American middle-class family. A story about a boy and

a man rafting down the Mississippi could be quintessentially American, but not

one about a family of women guarding the home front during the Civil War. If

American works are about the individual in opposition to family and society, the

individual testing himself in the wilderness, as midcentury critics were fond of

claiming, then Little Women does so only in rather subtle ways. ( Kiddie 120)

Twain’s fiction conformed more closely to the new standards of criticism; in the twentieth century Twain’s reputation would rise and Alcott’s would fall.

In order for Twain to be esteemed a great American author, his most famous book had to be reclaimed from the genre of children’s fiction. Just as James’ vindicates the experiences of boys in Stevenson’s novels, Twain’s narrative of Huck’s adventures on the Mississippi must aspire to the universal level. The critic Edwin H. Cady called it “’a book written not so much for the entertainment of boys as for the purpose of exploring and defining the experience—and its significance—of the American boy’” (qtd. in Clark, Kiddie 96). To solidify its identity as serious fiction, critics distinguished between Tom Sawyer , a boy’s book, and Huckleberry Finn , the adult 42 classic. 22 This preference for the adult and the masculine devalues writing by women or for children, especially female children. Clark writes:

…by assigning one book to the category of literature for children and the other to

that of literature for adults, critics were able to subordinate Tom Sawyer and

elevate Huckleberry Finn . Huckleberry Finn has not always been considered the

great American novel. Its greatness has had to be constructed—and was

constructed at the expense of Tom Sawyer and, I would argue, at the expense of a

fundamental respect for childhood and children’s literature. ( Kiddie 101)

More expressly, she says: “Certainly the careers of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn suggest that the literary establishment is adept at gerrymandering the literary landscape to ghettoize some works as juvenile while rescuing others from such opprobrium” ( Kiddie 127). The rescued works tend to be by male authors, like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland , while stories by female authors (notably missing “adventure” from the titles) remain in the children’s ghetto.

Conclusion

Alcott’s, Burnett’s, and Montgomery’s writing was shaped by the literature they had access to as children and by the commercial realities of children’s publishing at the time they were writing. In an interview, Burnett had complained about the type of literature she was expected to read as a child (when she had anything to read at all). She said:

22 The effort expended to distinguish between classics for adults and classics for children seems paradoxical when one considers, as Clark does, that “…if a work is to be canonical it must be taught to the young, must be, in some sense, literature for children” (101). In the case of Huckleberry Finn the irony is especially clear, “Critics who defend the book usually ignore age. Or they make contradictory claims—in one breath proclaiming the novel’s worth by saying it is not really a boys’ book; in the next, proclaiming its suitability as a class text for children” (99). If Tom Sawyer is indeed a children’s book, unlike Huckleberry Finn , is it not curious that as a society we select Huckleberry Finn as reading material for our children, rather than Tom Sawyer ? 43

During that period the mind of a child was seemingly innocently ranked slightly

above the mind of a turnip. Acridly or sentimentally moral or pious tales and

unconvincing adventures were in rare cases bestowed, at long intervals, as prizes

or birthday presents…. (“Magic” 260)

Both Alcott and Montgomery had also responded with distaste (and humor) to the exigency of providing “morals” to their stories, which they were often attempting to publish and distribute for venues like Sunday School circulating libraries. All three women had grown up reading religious, didactic literature as well as sentimental and sensational stories, which influenced their own fiction, either overtly, through explicit reference and parody, or more subtly, through characterization, themes, and tone.

Early children’s literature made a general impact in addition to the specific reactions it provoked from later writers. The early didactic literature, which depicted children as naturally sinful or which emphasized morality and good behavior, was eventually displaced by the evangelical child who acted as a spiritual guide to adults. The transition from innate sinfulness to natural innocence paved the way for individual characterization, as well as the depiction of the child as an alternative model of behavior and source of values, anticipating the fiction of later authors, like Dickens or Montgomery, who judge society by how well it treats its children

(MacLulich 387). The pattern of decreasing interest in religious didacticism or moral themes and a progressive emphasis on reading for pleasure can be discerned in novels as well as serial publications. Finally, the serial mode of publication and its momentum influenced each writer’s style, plot, and characterization, particularly in the cases of Montgomery and Burnett, who published the Anne series and The Secret Garden at the peak of the children’s serial’s popularity

(Gerson 53). In the following chapters, I will discuss the relationship between these books’ and 44 their literary and critical contexts. In addition, I will examine the contemporary reviews in conjunction with modern criticism to illustrate their enduring value and to argue for a serious analysis of their formal qualities.

45

Chapter Two: Little Women

Father saw Mr. Niles about a fairy book. Mr. N. wants a girls’ story , and I begin “Little Women.” Marmee, Anna, and May all approve my plan. So I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it. Louisa May Alcott, journal entry from May 1868

After the success of Little Women, Alcott returned to this entry, and, laconically, wrote:

“A good joke.” The book, in fact, “made her fortune,” being “the first golden egg of the ugly duckling,” and Alcott became the highest-paid female author of the nineteenth century, besting even Harriet Beecher Stowe, according to their mutual publisher, Roberts Brothers Company of

Boston (“Journals” 413; Sicherman 638). A hundred years after its publication, Little Women had sold 6 million domestic copies (Stimpson 593). Alcott’s profits from Little Women and her subsequent books finally allowed her to comfortably support her entire family, a dream she had sustained from young adulthood and had often had recourse to servitude to maintain. Even her father was able to trade on her good success, traveling the country lecturing as “the father of the

Little Women” and “riding in the Chariot of Glory wherever [he went]” (Bronson Alcott 417).

Alcott’s literary career, both before and after Little Women , is fascinating to examine, in part because of the consistency of the critical assessment of her writing (while she lived) and her own uniformity of style within the family genre. 23 The books which followed Little Women , such as An Old-Fashioned Girl , Eight Cousins , Rose in Bloom , and Jack and Jill , sustained the style and voice she had established in Little Women and that had first emerged in her earlier publications. Alcott, who had come to be known as “the children’s friend,” had created a

23 The complexity of Alcott’s relationship with her work has perhaps proved to be the most compelling reason to study her literary career. The “darker” side of Alcott’s personality and writing has been the subject of numerous late twentieth century biographies, critical studies, and republications, including Madeleine Stern’s A Double Life, Daniel Shealy’s Freaks of Genius , Elaine Showalter’s Alternative Alcott , David Reynold’s Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville , and Elizabeth Keyser’s Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott (Keyser xii-xiii; 192). 46 narrative persona inextricably bound up with her own identity and which she adjusted very little, if at all, in her family fiction.

Alcott first achieved notable critical acclaim for Hospital Sketches , her slightly fictionalized account of the six weeks she nursed Civil War soldiers in Washington, D.C. The

Sketches originated as letters home to her family, and they were published serially in The

Commonwealth in 1863. The reviewers praised her easy, “natural” style and admired her piquant and cheerful narration, commending her ability to blend pathos and humor. The Sketches were released in book form after the success of Little Women to another round of positive reviews

(amazingly consistent with reactions to their initial publication). One such review in Round

Table encapsulated the general response to Alcott’s Hospital Sketches since their initial publication:

…the incidents which she has given us are so varied, --sometimes amusingly

humorous and sometimes tenderly pathetic,--and her narrative is so simple and

straightforward and truthful, that the reader’s attention is chained, and he finds it

impossible to resist the charm of the pleasant, kindly, keen-sighted Nurse

Perriwinkle. (Clark, Reviews 20)

The harshest criticism Alcott received for her Sketches was the charge of “levity,” an exuberance and “rollicking vivacity” unsuited to the “somber realities” of hospital life ( New York Tribune qtd. in Clark, Reviews 11). This criticism was limited, however, and often directly objected to in the pages of other papers and magazines. Most reviewers commented on the genuine, tender sympathy conveyed in these scenes of hospital life and defended “the quiet humor and lively wit, relieving what would otherwise be a topic too somber and sad” ( The Boston Evening Transcript , 47 qtd. in Clark, Reviews 9). The overwhelming impression Hospital Sketches created was of an author of powerful ability and realistic characterization.

Her earlier work includes her first published book, Flower Fables , a series of tales written for the children of neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a later novel, Moods , which recounts the tale of an independent woman torn between two lovers (supposedly modeled on

Emerson and Thoreau). Flower Fables received limited, but favorable notice, and Moods met mixed reviews. In the introduction to Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary Reviews , Beverly

Clark specifically addresses the complaints of a reviewer for the Independent and of Henry

James. James professed himself to be “utterly weary of stories about precocious little girls,” 24 and the Independent reviewer criticized “’the elaborate agony of these self-tormenting heroines’ so favored by ‘our lady-writers’” ( Reviews xi). This book, which engages seriously (and tragically) with feminism and the problem of marriage, provoked many negative, gender-fueled responses. [In a review entitled “Another Feminine Novelist” from the Springfield Daily

Republican , a critic writes: “Now we do not question the sincerity of these maiden reformers, who, knowing nothing of marriage by experience, are eager in defense of a fancied remedy for acknowledged social evils. But we regard them as mistaken nonetheless” (Clark, Reviews 27).]

Harper’s Weekly , on the other hand, proclaimed that “After Hawthorne we recall no American love-story of equal power,” and argued that “’Moods’ is neither sentimental nor morbid nor extravagant. It has freshness and self-reliance” (Clark, Reviews 29). Most reviews, positive or negative, linked Moods to Hospital Sketches . The Commonwealth echoed the familiar praises of

Alcott’s “quick fancy, lively wit, and clear observation,” but issued the moderate verdict:

“Nothing could be more artless than…[ Moods ]. An intense desire to exhibit the subject as it lies

24 Clark points out the hypocrisy of such a complaint from the author of What Maisie Knew . 48 in the author’s mind is plain…, but it is forgotten that the true artist’s work is to represent, not to exhort; to suggest rather than to insist” (Clark, Reviews 28). If there were a negative consensus, it would be that Alcott’s narration of events was preferable to her exposition of “ideas” in a dark

“metaphysical” work, even if clarity of style, humor, and earnestness were preserved.

From 1863-1869 she published her “pot-boilers,” or thrillers, under the pseudonym A.M.

Barnard. This period of her career is described in Little Women as Jo’s venture in New York, which terminates when she is chastised by her future husband for writing stories unfit for the moral digestion of the young, and by the narrator, who deplores the damage such writing does to the “bloom” of Jo’s youthful virginity (Alcott 280; 275). Professor Bhaer’s timely disgust propels Jo to the opposite extreme. She goes from writing sensation stories to producing a moral tale in the style of “Mrs. Sherwood, Miss Edgeworth, and Hannah More…which may have been more properly called an essay or sermon, so intensely moral was it” (Alcott 281). Her failure in this endeavor [“she was inclined to agree with Mr. Dashwood, that morals didn’t sell” (Alcott

281)] led her to “a child’s story,” which she found incompatible with her temperament, for

Jo could not consent to depict all her naughty boys as being eaten by bears, or

tossed by mad bulls, because they did not go to a particular Sabbath-school, nor

all the good infants who did go, of course, as rewarded by every kind of bliss,

from gilded gingerbread to escorts of angels, when they departed this life, with

psalms or sermons on their lisping tongues. 25 (281)

25 Thirty-two years later Montgomery confessed (in language strikingly similar to Alcott’s): “I like doing these [children’s stories] but would like it better if I didn’t have to lug a moral into most of them. They won’t sell without it. The kind of juvenile story I like to write—and, read, too, for the matter of that—is a rattling good jolly one—‘art for art’s sake’—or rather ‘fun for fun’s sake’—with no insidious moral hidden away in it like a spoonful of jam” (qtd. in Foster and Simons, 158-159).

49

The tension between the public Alcott’s rejection of sensational writings and her private output, as well as Alcott’s recorded ambivalence to writing children’s stories, or “moral pap for the young,” and her enormous success with them, leave an ambiguous and conflicted portrait of the artist, complicated by the confounding of fiction and autobiography ( Jo’s Boys 39). She justified both sensational and moral writing through her desire for money to support her family, leaving one to wonder which stories she rejoiced in, if any, or if she saw them all as a means to an end, tainted by the demands of the public and her publishers.

The fictional resolution of Jo’s dilemma—she cannot write in the style of Edgeworth and she will not write in the style of Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth—parodied by her “Mrs. S.L.A.N.G.

Northbury”—is the temporary renunciation of her pen (Brodhead 629). She resolves to know more before she attempts to write again, and this involves taking Professor Bhaer’s advice “to study simple, true, and lovely characters, wherever she found them” (Alcott 275-6). Her apprenticeship to experience is fulfilled with the death of Beth, and heeding her mother’s advice,

Jo “’writes something for [her family],’” ignoring “’the rest of the world’” (Alcott 339). Alcott narrates: “For a small thing, it was a great success” and “went straight to the hearts of those who read it” (340). Jo asks: “’…what can there be in a simple little story like that, to make people praise it so?’” and her father responds: “’There is truth in it, Jo—that’s the secret; humor and pathos make it alive, and you have found your style at last. You wrote with no thought of fame or money, and put your heart into it, my daughter…’” (Alcott 340). In fiction, the ability to ignore “’the rest of the world’” with “’no thought of fame or money’” results in a simple and true story that goes straight from the heart of the writer to the hearts of her readers, uncorrupted. 26

26 Several months after the L.C. Page Co. of Boston accepted Anne of Green Gables for publication, Montgomery recorded in her journal: “They took it and asked me to write a sequel to it. The book may or may not sell well. I wrote it for love, not money—but very often such books are the most successful—just as everything in life that is born of true love is better than something constructed for mercenary ends” (285). This entry recalls Alcott on two 50

In reality, the writing of Little Women was not such a sure, inviolate exercise, but Alcott’s journal entries confirm her belief in what Father March explains is the appeal of such a simple book: truth, goodness, and love. Rejecting the extremes of sensation, sentimentalism, and didacticism, Alcott wrote Little Women , featuring elements of all three in a style completely her own. She incorporates sensation by including Jo’s (and her own) attempts to write for money, the

March’s amateur theatrical productions, and the girls’ literary society modeled after The

Pickwick Portfolio and the Alcott’s The Olive Leaf . Sentimentalism and didacticism feature most vividly in the narration’s moral asides and the death of Beth.

When Thomas Niles requested she write him a “girl’s book,” and Alcott dubiously promised “to try,” like Jo she turned to her own family for inspiration (Alcott, “Journals” 412).

For some critics, Little Women ’s approximation to autobiography diminishes the extent of

Alcott’s achievement. For others, its basis in fact was her principal strength. Harper’s New

Monthly Magazine published a review in which a critic praised the naturalness of Alcott’s narration, claiming that Little Women was “free from that false sentiment which pervades too much of juvenile literature.” The reviewer attributed this quality of sincerity to the book’s origins:

“Autobiographies, if genuine, are generally interesting” (553). Alcott also attributed her success to the book’s basis in fact. In a letter to Mary E. Channing Higginson, the wife of Civil War

Colonel Higginson, Alcott wrote: “The characters were drawn from life, which gives them

points: the careful, self-effacing expression of her expectations as a writer, and her assertion that success follows sincerity. As female artists, Alcott and Montgomery protected themselves from failure and criticism (or success) by qualifying their own opinion of their work and eschewing pretensions to artistry. Alcott and Montgomery entertained a higher opinion of their writing than they at times acknowledged and chafed at the restrictiveness of the label “children’s author.” If one sees this as a response to a society and literary culture that censured or failed to recognize female achievement, then the belief Alcott and Montgomery express, that success is a measurement of the “heart” one invests in a work, seems to be a simultaneous, circumspect challenge to a masculine tradition predicated on intellect.

51 whatever merit they possess; for I find it impossible to invent anything half so true or touching as the simple facts which every day life supplies me” (Alcott, “Journals” 419).

Even those reviewers who did not comment on the verisimilitude between the Alcott and

March families observed that the author’s depiction of juvenile psychology and genteel family life was refreshingly and enjoyably realistic. In 1869 a reviewer from Catholic World wrote:

“that there is a real Jo somewhere we have not the slightest doubt” (552). The Hartford Courant opined that there was “just enough of sadness in it to make it true to life,” tempered with “honest work and whole-souled fun” (551), and The Commonwealth applauded the “charm and attractiveness…naturalness and grace” of Alcott’s characters and narration (550). The

Commonwealth proceeded to comment: “The varied emotions of the young heart are here caught and transfixed so that we almost note the expression of the face upon the printed page” (550).

Beverly Clark, quoting nineteenth-century reviewers, attributes Alcott’s success to “‘the thorough reality of her characters,’ her ‘power of intense realization and portraiture,’ ‘her thorough genuineness and steady adherence to the real’” ( Kiddie 105).

What the critics responded to the most, however, were the liveliness and fun of this new novel of the home “with these earnest, delightful people” in it ( The National Anti-Slavery

Standard 550). The long-lived Youth’s Companion praised it as “an exceedingly sprightly, wide- awake volume” (547). Even while The Ladies’ Repository denied Little Women ’s suitability for the Sunday School Library (it was not religious enough), they described Alcott as “a very sprightly writer, fresh and truthful to nature and character” and called her characters “lively girls” in a story “vivaciously told” (552; 549). The encomiums “lively,” “hearty,” “fun,” and

“energetic,” were liberally repeated, and many reviewers seemed surprised to find such an account of “healthy, happy homes,” “everyday child-life,” and “ordinary” incident so enjoyable. 52

Alcott and her publisher Thomas Niles considered the first volume a little “dull” and lacking interest, but readers eagerly embraced this simple story of four sisters growing up in Concord during the Civil War. The “genuine humor and pathos” of their domestic lives and individual development made up for whatever was lacking in conventional plot and excitement ( The

Spectator 549). A reviewer from Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine wrote: “The book is most originally written. It never gets commonplace or wearisome, though it deals with the most ordinary everyday life” (548). Reviewers bemusedly pondered the attraction of Alcott’s genre stories throughout her entire career. Clark writes:

Several 1870 reviewers also sounded another note that would recur: Alcott’s

domestic stories lacked what they conceived of as a plot. The reviewer for the

Atlantic Monthly found [ An Old-Fashioned Girl ] “almost inexplicably pleasing,

since it is made up of such plain material, and helped off with no sort of adventure

or sensation.” ( Reviews xii)

The surprise of Little Women ’s success reveals its originality in a literary climate that expected drama, adventure, or excitement.

The reviews identify three primary explanations for Alcott’s appeal. Firstly, almost all reviewers commented on the authorial voice or Alcott’s “style” of writing. From her early success of Hospital Sketches through her latest publications, critics recalled her energy, clarity, power, directness, sense, and humor. Understandably, the simple and direct style she adopted seemed an insufficient explanation for her great appeal (certainly a more subtle one), and most critics did not consciously acknowledge the primacy of the voice in their appreciation of her writing. Inevitably, however, each reviewer addressed the freshness and power of Alcott’s style, often in conjunction with a discussion of the vitality, realism, and originality of her characters. 53

“Love” is more appropriate than “appeal” in this context, because the characters of Little Women , especially Jo March, are probably responsible for the lion’s share of readers’ assertions of

Alcott’s genius. Finally, readers responded to the warmth of the novel, to the themes of love of home and family, the celebration of the self, and the representation of American middle-class life.

Her domestic scenes in all their funny human familiarity resonated with readers eager to embrace a story “written from the heart” with all the genuineness and affection of the author’s own experience.

Style

Little Women is not a simple text. Elizabeth Vincent, writing for the New Republic in

1924, wondered why little girls in the twentieth century still read Little Women . Pronouncing it unexciting, formulaic, and behind the times, especially in its vision of the domestic woman, she superciliously concedes “that these impossible Marches are real people. The children who get so absorbed in them are not wrong in finding them alive and true” (555). Nevertheless, Vincent finds them “perfectly categorical” and divests Alcott of any credit for their creation, claiming that whatever value her characters possess is attributable to their real life counterparts, not to that

“which passes for Miss Alcott’s art” (555-6). Additionally, she considers the episodic structure of the book mundane and artificial, describing each chapter as “a neatly rounded episode, loaded with its lesson, and capped with repentance and tears and a few words of comfort from Mrs.

March” (555). Vincent’s criticisms are worth noting here for several reasons. Firstly, she asks the perennial question: why do girls (or boys or women or men) still read Little Women ?27 Secondly,

27 Her answer, at the end of the article, is that “little girls have a natural depraved taste for moralizing” (556). Curiously, this same answer is applied forty years later to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird , another book written by a woman about a tomboy and read predominantly by juveniles. Mockingbird was a great popular success, like Little Women , which was capitalized on commercially and has achieved iconic status while failing to elicit much critical attention. Praised for its warmth and its portrayal of a decent, happy family, the novel has perplexed critics who cannot account for its persistent appeal (Petry xviii). 54 she implies that Little Women fits a predictable, simplistic pattern that is repellently didactic or sentimental. As to the first question, the answer must depend on personal taste, but the critical consensus is that Alcott was a talented writer of emotional depth who told an original and compelling story. The following pages address Alcott’s narrative style, which relates closely to

Vincent’s observations on the structure and genre of Little Women .

Genre

The weight of critical material is not on Vincent’s side. Most critics write at length about

Alcott’s departure from sentimental fiction and formulaic moral tales. Alcott’s combination of realism and domestic history was distinct from the existing genres available for women or girls.

Neither a sentimental story á la Elsie Dinsmore or The Wide, Wide World , nor a moral tract circulated by Sunday School libraries, Little Women began a tradition of domestic realism and girls’ fiction that was increasingly secular, focused on childhood, and peopled by autonomous and spirited heroines. Alison Lurie states that Jo March has “almost nothing in common with the suffering, self-sacrificing heroines” of the best-selling novels of the day (14); and if Vincent sees

Jo March as the tomboy type, perhaps it is because she is the character upon whom the mold is cast. Lurie and Avery identify Little Women as the origin of a new heroine and narrative genre.

Lurie argues:

Before Little Women there was one ideal type of girlhood in most American

juvenile literature: modest, dutiful, and obedient. Alcott suggested that there was a

Harold Bloom, acknowledging that the novel was impossible not to like, wondered whether it would seem in future “a sentimental romance of a particular moment or a canonical narrative” (qtd. in Betts 141). The elite literary establishment, perhaps operating under the same principles of exclusion—popularity, women, children—that debarred Alcott from the canon for so long, ignores Lee as well. Most published responses to Mockingbird are written by culture critics, teachers, lawyers, and lay readers who discuss Mockingbird the same way Little Women is discussed. People love the characters and admire their moral integrity. They embrace the picture of the American home/sanctuary presided over by a loving parent. Gerald Early and Doris Bets, in essays compiled by Alice Petry in her book On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections , write that the appeal of Mockingbird comes from a natural desire “for moralizing,” an assurance that there is a right and a wrong, that people know what it is and can live up to it. 55

range of possibilities, and also that a heroine could have serious faults—vanity,

jealousy, sloth, or anger—and still earn a happy ending. 28 (18)

Avery concurs:

Indeed, when one considers the fiction available for girls before 1868 we

recognize it as a work of extraordinary achievement. Here Alcott broke away

from high-flown sentiments and pious admonitions, from the overwrought

emotion of Susan Warner, and presented attractive, credible, strongly

differentiated characters with recognizable failings. Moreover, she credited her

readers with enough intelligence to perceive these last for themselves, and forbore

to point a finger or to lecture. ( Behold 170)

Vincent’s contention that each girl represents a single virtue or flaw and is therefore an allegorical stereotype is unsupported. Alcott achieves a roundness to her characters that is attested to by the numerous reviews already cited that praise the thorough reality and individuality of her characters.

For example, Amy is described at the beginning of the novel as a spoiled and petulant child, but these traits do not dominate her characterization. She affects airs and graces, mispronounces words, if she uses them correctly at all, wants to be an artist, and usually makes an effort to be good, with varying levels of success. Her adolescent desire to be considered grown-up endears her to the reader rather than alienates her, and her good nature with others and desire to be liked by them contrasts with her antagonistic relationship with her older sister. When she grows up she does not transform, but her early sensitivity and pride develop her consciousness of other people’s feelings and her awareness of social proprieties. Her desire to be

28 Burnett’s The Secret Garden takes this license to its extreme—Mary Lennox is the most unpromising heroine of the early twentieth century. 56 dignified means that she cannot be quarrelsome, and her generous nature makes her gracious and forgiving. Alcott maintains the willfulness and determination of the child Amy in the young woman without being judgmental. In an argument with Jo about inviting wealthier friends to “an absurdly pretentious luncheon” (Brodhead 624), Amy triumphs when she says:

The girls do care for me, and I for them, and there’s a great deal of kindness, and

sense, and talent among them, in spite of what you call fashionable nonsense. You

don’t care to make people like you, to go into good society, and cultivate your

manners and tastes. I do, and I mean to make the most of every chance that comes.

You can go through the world with your elbows out and your nose in the air, and

call it independence, if you like. That’s not my way. (207)

Alcott gives Amy a voice and a valid alternative to Jo’s perspective. She is not portrayed as a social climber or ingratiate, and her individuality is affirmed by her desire to lead a different life from the one Jo chooses. 29

Even when Amy’s dignity and tact are rewarded by a trip to Europe, Alcott is not finished shaping her character. Prudent Amy is tired of poverty, and being of a more practical than romantic nature, determines to accept an offer of marriage from a man she does not love.

Alcott, unusually quiet about this crucial dilemma, allows Amy to decide for herself without authorial comment. Amy decides to refuse the proposal, but Alcott’s silence affirms Amy’s agency and complicates the tension between idealism and practicality introduced through Amy’s character. The shades and variations of her character and her development through the book prevent her from being reduced to a simple type.

29 Ultimately, her luncheon is a failure, yet Alcott’s interest in the event lies in the tension between Amy’s good intentions and Jo’s grumpy recalcitrance. 57

Nor are the other characters reduced to simple types, but are developed as individuals through their separate experiences. Laurie is sensitive, energetic, and good-hearted, but he is also lazy and immature. His evolution from boyhood to young adulthood spans the entire novel, and his essential characteristics neither suddenly appear nor disappear. His self-indulgence as a boy make him lively and moody, and as a young man make him narcissistic and lazy. His experiences of failure and rejection develop his self-awareness and resolve. Even Marmee, the seeming epitome of maternal perfection and serenity, speaks to Jo about her frustration and anger.

Her role within the novel is predominantly backstage, especially as the sisters age. Instead of being an authority-figure, she allows her children to make their own mistakes and is not depicted as righteous or very pious. Alcott emphasizes her grief rather than her resignation at the death of

Beth.

Marmee is the strongest link between the tradition of sentimental novels and the book

Alcott wrote. The emphasis on sisterliness and female power in a domestic setting recall sentimental fiction, but not strongly enough to induct Little Women into that tradition. Religion does not play a significant role, and the book does not emphasize oppression, suffering, or redemption. Richard Brodhead, in his essay “Alcott, Authorship, and the Postbellum Literary

Field,” observes a “new liberality of tone” which “brings a mirth to the plot of female domestication not found in the novels of the 1850s” (624). In addition to Little Women ’s new emphasis on play and fun and to the narrator’s sense of humor, the gravity and seriousness of sentimental fiction is replaced by an insistently matter-of-fact, realistic interpretation of events.

Brodhead writes:

…Little Women is a remarkably secular text, a de-evangelized domestic text, so to

speak. The book’s deactivation of such older authority systems is what creates the 58

possibility for its brand of domestic realism. The foibles of everyday life can be

caught in their funny human familiarity here because they are not being nailed to

heavily sanctioned moral meanings. (625)

Thus Amy may disobey her teacher, Meg may flirt and drink wine, and Jo may offend all of

Concord, but no one is punished beyond the reasonable consequences of their actions (Amy is temporarily abashed, Meg ashamed, and Jo passed over for a trip to Europe in favor of her sociable sister). 30 Brodhead’s analysis differentiates between domestic fiction and Alcott’s mode of domestic realism. Instead of using the home as the setting for a tale of the spiritual submission of woman to the trials of this earth and the will of others, Alcott uses the home to tell the story of a family. Readers and critics praised her book for its originality because it was original; it set the standard for the girls’ books that were to follow.

Structure

As Vincent observed, the chapter structure of Little Women is episodic, which was not unusual at the time, when many novels first appeared in serial form. Children’s stories especially are compatible with this form, which allow for self-contained segments that can satisfy and retain a reader’s interest in each chapter. Alcott had already written and published short stories for magazines chronicling her childhood experiences, and she adapted some of these for Little

Women . Her biographer, Madeleine Stern, writes:

Her technique, Louisa realized, had been composite, for she had simply

amalgamated truth with some little fiction, borrowing her details from life and

from her earlier stories. As each day she completed a chapter, she perceived also

30 An exception noted by Brodhead is Jo’s refusal to forgive her penitent sister, which almost results in Amy’s death (625). Even this episode is viewed less as a punishment than as an accident that would have brought feelings of guilt had it not ended with Amy’s rescue. In fact, the episode is based upon Alcott’s own fall into a pond when she was a child, so its inclusion in the story is not merely a gratuitous example of the dangers of holding a grudge. 59

that her technique was still that of the short-story writer, for each portion

concerned one sister, the episode of Meg’s married life alternating with Amy’s

experiences abroad or Jo’s struggles with herself at home. (Phillips and Eiselein

442)

Despite the alternation between characters, the episodes are almost seamlessly bound together. The story concerns a family, and the lives of its individual members are necessarily interwoven. In the first volume, when the girls are younger and all living in one home, many experiences are shared. In fact, most chapters in this volume are not organized around a single sister or event. Rather, the chapters can be grouped together because they are related in tone and plot. In the first two chapters, for example, “Playing Pilgrims” and “A Merry Christmas,” the girls complain about their poverty, buy presents for their mother instead of for themselves, receive a letter from their absent father, donate their breakfast to a poorer family, produce a play, and are given an extravagant meal to make up for the breakfast they did not eat. The action of these chapters unites around the Christmas theme, rather than around a single event. Alcott deftly connects these first chapters to the one that follows with the introduction of “the Laurence boy” in the last few pages, the instigator of their generous Christmas feast. Meg and Jo attend the New

Year’s Eve ball in the third chapter, which results in Meg’s attendance at Sallie Moffat’s several chapters later and in Jo’s friendship with Laurie. Chapters Five and Six, “Being Neighbourly” and “Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful,” are the beginning of the March family friendship with

Laurie, and like the first two chapters, are necessary complements. Both chapters are needed to cement the bond between the two houses, first with Jo’s visit in Chapter Five and then with

Beth’s visit in Chapter Six. Alcott alternates the action of the story with a series of chapters that detail daily life as opposed to special events, and the relatively rapid pace of the first few 60 chapters is succeeded by the more measured account of domestic experiences in chapters ten through fourteen. The alternation between significant events and daily life creates the illusion of passing time and defies a linear plot pattern that escalates to a climax and then resolves.

The arrangement of the episodes allows Alcott to control the dramatic tension. She introduces Beth’s illness two chapters after Mr. March is wounded and after the reader’s anxiety for his safety has abated. In the midst of Beth’s illness, Alcott leaves the sickroom to visit Amy at Aunt March’s, creating an emotional removal from the “dark days” at home. When the reader most fears Beth’s death, she is reprieved and the reader feels relief in place of sadness. Beth does not fully recover, and without being maudlin, Alcott quietly and straightforwardly narrates her decline through the second volume, not allowing the drama to reach the climax of her initial brush with death. This deliberate de-escalation of what is usually recalled as the most emotional part of Little Women conforms to Alcott’s voice of insistent directness and resilience. Beth’s death, once established as a certainty and accepted by her family, loses its suspenseful tension and is replaced by grief. In a paradigmatic example of Alcott’s narrative voice, she writes:

Seldom, except in books, do the dying utter memorable words, see visions, or

depart with beatified countenances; and those who have sped many parting souls

know, that to most the end comes as naturally and simply as sleep. As Beth had

hoped, the ‘tide went out easily’; and in the dark hour before the dawn, on the

bosom where she had drawn her first breath, she quietly drew her last, with no

farewell but one loving look and a little sigh. (327)

The darkest moments come after Beth is gone, and Jo is left with her grief in a house she fears will become more like a prison to her than a home. Before we read about Jo’s grief, however,

Alcott transitions to Amy and Laurie’s courtship in Europe. As before, Alcott lightens the 61 emotional load when it is heaviest, and the reader has a reprieve before revisiting the mourning family.

Alcott creates tension in humorous ways as well. After Amy leaves for Europe, Mrs.

March no longer has an immediate way to influence her daughter. Amy writes home about her encounters with Fred Vaughn, a rich man whose proposal Amy plans to accept in order to secure money and position in society. She tells her mother:

Don’t be anxious about me; remember I am your ‘prudent Amy,’ and be sure I

will do nothing rashly. Send me as much advice as you like; I’ll use it if I can. I

wish I could see you for a good talk, Marmee. (253)

The chapter ends here, but the next one immediately begins with Marmee’s words to Jo: “Jo, I am anxious about Beth” (253). The word “anxious” connects the two passages. One can imagine the anxiety of a mother separated from her daughter, who cannot help but “be anxious” about the course she is taking. The irony of the first passage is that it is precisely Amy’s prudence that worries Mrs. March. The familiarity of the scene—a daughter telling a mother not to worry in a context which can only foment her anxiety—increases its urgency. While her youngest is on the verge of accepting a marriage proposal from a man she does not love, the reader hears Mrs.

March express her preoccupation about Beth, instead of the expected name “Amy.” The substitution reminds the reader how many daughters Mrs. March must worry about and smoothly transitions to Beth’s troubles while preserving the suspense over Amy’s decision.

While the chapters are grouped tonally and thematically, the overall structure of the novel is determined by character development rather than plot. The chronological order of the novel allows Alcott to focus on the girls’ maturation. The themes of self-reliance, love, service, and dignity despite poverty are developed in each chapter through the girls’ trials with themselves 62 and others. Jo, for example, finds it difficult to subdue a restless spirit throughout the entire novel; Alcott continually returns to Jo’s temper and rebelliousness. While some chapters may end neatly with the girls absorbing a moral lesson, Alcott does not allow them to resolve their problems as the result of a single experience. Amy’s worldliness, Meg’s struggle with poverty,

Jo’s temper, and Beth’s shyness persist in the novel. In the absence of a conventional plot, Alcott creates tension through the girls’ inner struggles and their conflicts with society. The persistence of their personal problems and their efforts to overcome them reflect reality. Alcott’s description of their lives encompasses ordinary as well as significant events and contributes to a textured reality in which there is a simultaneous sense of time passing and isolated, static events.

Voice

The narrative voice of Little Women is for me and for others at least implicitly the primary reason for its enduring success. Alcott naturally and imperceptibly inhabits the distinct voices of each character while moving in and out of her own (the narrator’s). The reviews praised the apparent simplicity of her style; her direct, straightforward prose that eschewed both preaching and melodrama; the omniscient common sense, practicality, and optimism that could be funny, serious, or pathetic. Her writing was called genuine, natural, warm, and powerful. The narrative voice is so powerful that in spite of the many distinct and well-developed primary characters in Little Women , the holistic impression remains that of a single voice exuding resilience and determination. Most readers identify with the principal heroine Jo, which is another way of identifying with the narrative voice, for Alcott is both the wiser narrator and her younger self and literary alter ego. In Alcott’s narration, the reader hears “bold, outspoken, brave, daring, loyal, cranky, principled, and real” Jo March. (Reisen 2). The bond of sympathy and understanding this creates between the narrator and her character extends to the reader, who 63 responds to the youthful defiance and individuality of Jo as well as to the mature reflections of her omniscient narrator. The narration layers what the characters know and feel and what the narrator knows and tells.

The first chapter is perhaps the iconic Little Women scene, with the girls gathered around the fire at Christmas awaiting their mother’s return and lamenting their father’s absence and their poverty. Alcott bluntly introduces their characters through dialogue. 31 Usually she appends a narrative clause at the end that describes the speaker’s manner, feelings, or actions. The reader learns in these narrative asides that Meg, for example, “could remember better times” and that

“gloves were a tender point with her” (12; 28); that Jo spoke “with her mouth full” and “never troubled herself much about dress” (27); that Beth possessed a hand “that all the dish-washing and dusting in the world could not make ungentle in its touch” (13); and that Amy “began to talk of renouncing childish things at the mature age of twelve” (18). Alcott does not attempt a longer narrated description of the girls’ characters until the third chapter, allowing their dialogue and her brief asides to perform the initial exposition. The method of combining the narrator’s insight with the character’s perspective is repeated throughout the novel, and is almost unnoticeable.

Stern writes that Alcott’s narrative voice was intended to be emphatically unromantic and realistic. “The style, Louisa was sure, was styleless. Good strong words that meant something,

31 Although I have not found this criticism repeated anywhere else, it seems to me that the first chapter is more forced than other chapters. Alcott seems to be very self-consciously adapting her style for a juvenile audience. Take the first few sentences:

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

“It’s so dreadful to be poor!” sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.

“I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have lots of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,” added little Amy, with an injured sniff.

“We’ve got father and mother, and each other, anyhow,” said Beth, contentedly, from her corner. (11)

As Alcott continues, her style becomes more natural and less foreshortened. The girls, more fully developed, do not stereotype themselves. 64 unpolished grammar—these would create the mannerless manner that would achieve verisimilitude” (Phillips and Eiselein 437). Alcott created a narrative persona that was insistently down-to-earth, often humorous, “usually tolerant and bemused” (Brodhead 629). Her humor focuses on the familiar and gently exploits her characters’ foibles and emotions. The following is an excerpt from the beginning of the second volume in which Alcott describes Meg’s domestic ambition as she prepares for married life in a new house.

It was a tiny house, with a little garden behind, and a lawn about as big as a

pocket-handkerchief in front. Here Meg meant to have a fountain, shrubbery, and

a profusion of lovely flowers; though just at present the fountain was represented

by a weather-beaten urn, very like a dilapidated slop-bowl; the shrubbery

consisted of several young larches, who looked undecided whether to live or die,

and the profusion of flowers was merely hinted by regiments of sticks, to show

where seeds were planted. (192)

The situation is so familiar—there are no limitations to the fond observer—and Alcott’s irony so quietly humorous, that the reader is able to relate both to Meg and to the narrator.

Her sense of humor is also apparent in her deconstruction of the sentimental, romantic, or consciously literary. She describes Laurie’s incipient passion for Jo in this way: “But there came a time when Laurie ceased to worship at many shrines, hinted darkly at one all-absorbing passion, and indulged occasionally in Byronic fits of gloom” (225). Jo, of course, proves immoveable, for

“she preferred imaginary heroes to real ones, because, when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin-kitchen till called for, and the latter were less manageable” (255). Alcott famously denies the union all readers of Little Women clamored for, and marries the romantic 65 lead (Laurie) to Jo’s younger sister Amy. As many critics have pointed out, she pairs Jo with the emphatically unromantic older German professor, Friedrich Bhaer, whom Jo herself describes as

…rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, droll

nose, the kindest eyes I ever saw, and splendid big voice that does one’s ears

good…. His clothes were rusty, his hands were large, and he hadn’t a handsome

feature in his face, except his beautiful teeth. (263)

In the meantime, Laurie is left to get over his heartache by composing an opera in which Jo is meant to figure. He, of course, finds it is impossible to imagine Jo as a tragic heroine and must substitute a beautiful, anonymous “complaisant wraith” of whom he became quite fond, “as well he might—for he gifted her with every gift and grace under the sun, and escorted her, unscathed, through trials which would have annihilated any mortal woman” (329). Her subversion of the reader’s romantic expectations is comical in both its content and her expression of it. Her refusal to turn Jo into a romantic lead affirms her commitment to realism. It also allows her to demonstrate her acuity in understanding and deflating common emotions—Laurie’s adolescent passion, Jo’s antagonism toward romance, and Laurie’s “rebound.”

In spite of all this, there are three marriages in Little Women (and four proposals, five if you count Fred Vaughn’s) to satisfy a reader’s desire for romance. Alcott cleverly deconstructs sentimentalism and the consciously literary at the same time she employs literary devices and the romantic. Her determination to write simply and earnestly leads her to announce the presence of extended metaphors and similes. When Laurie encounters Amy in Nice, the reader expects romance. Alcott addresses this expectation directly. Laurie and Amy visit the estate Valrosa where “summer roses blossomed everywhere” (315). Alcott writes: 66

…Every shadowy nook, where seats invited one to stop and rest, was a mass of

bloom; every cool grotto had its marble nymph smiling from a veil of flowers;

and every fountain reflected crimson, white, or pale pink roses, leaning down to

smile at their own beauty. (315)

Even the characters feel compelled to acknowledge the romance of their secluded and idyllic setting; Amy says to Laurie: “’This is a regular honey-moon Paradise, isn’t it? Did you ever see such roses?’” (315). The dramatic irony of the scene (the readers and Laurie know that he has been rejected by Jo, while Amy does not) increases the significance of an already pregnant scene.

Amy unwittingly appreciates the potential for romance, while Laurie self-consciously regards it as a chapter in his life already closed. He answers, “’No, nor felt such thorns,’…with his thumb in his mouth, after a vain attempt to capture a solitary scarlet flower [Jo] that grew just beyond his reach” (315). Amy advises him to seek a flower with no thorns [herself] and offers him a cluster of “tiny cream-colored ones” (315). Alcott narrates (what the reader already realizes):

…he was just then in that state of half-sweet, half-bitter melancholy, when

imaginative young men find significance in trifles, and food for romance

everywhere. He had thought of Jo in reaching after the thorny red rose…. The

pale roses Amy gave him were the sort that the Italians lay in dead hands,--never

in bridal wreaths,--and, for a moment, he wondered if the omen was for Jo or for

himself. But the next instant his American common-sense got the better

sentimentality, and he laughed a heartier laugh than Amy had heard since he came.

(315)

She constructs the romance of the scene at the same time she defuses its “sentimentality.” Her narration of Jo’s romance with Professor Bhaer repeats this subversion. She uses similes and 67 metaphors, but not conventional ones. Jo is “like a chestnut burr” and a “grasshopper,” two distinctly unromantic comparisons that nevertheless sweeten her love story through their endearing suitability (338; 353).

Alcott utilizes literary devices at other times in the novel to expeditiously characterize someone or to describe an action, but most of them are dispatched so matter-of-factly and concisely that they hardly register as more than literal prose. Her most ambitious and pervasive metaphor is the modeling of Little Women on Pilgrim’s Progress . The first chapter introduces

Alcott’s intention to narrate her characters’ journeys of development, which they themselves identify with Bunyan’s allegory. 32 Mrs. March asks her daughters if they remember playing

Pilgrim’s Progress as little girls, and tells them:

“We never are too old for this, my dear, because it is a play we are playing all the

time in one way or another. Our burdens are here, our road is before us, and the

longing for goodness and happiness is the guide that leads us through many

troubles and mistakes to the peace which is a true Celestial City. Now, my little

pilgrims, suppose you begin again, not in play, but in earnest, and see how far on

you can get before father comes home.” (18)

Meg answers: “’Let us do it…. It is only another name for trying to be good, and the story may help us’” (18). The metatextuality functions on two levels: the characters within the book consciously enact a literary allegory and the readers recognize that both texts are fictions and are encouraged to accept Little Women as their Pilgrim’s Progress . Here again Alcott is effectively

32 Additionally, the author’s preface is an adapted excerpt from The Pilgrim’s Progress . Many of her chapters reference or echo Christian’s journey. Among them are “Playing Pilgrims,” “Burdens,” “Beth finds the Palace Beautiful,” “Amy’s Valley of Humiliation,” “Jo meets Apollyon,” and “The Valley of the Shadow.” Periodically, Alcott will explicitly remind the reader of the frame. For example, Jo’s struggle to overcome her despair after Beth’s death is compared to Christian climbing “the hill called Difficulty” (339).

68 permitted to use a literary device by disarming it and demonstrating its constructedness. While she makes the connections explicit, she can maintain a tone of realism by acknowledging her departures from literal meaning, often by revealing her metaphors through the consciousness and dialogue of her characters.

Description

Alcott’s use of imagery is much less central to her novel than is the case in either Anne of

Green Gables or The Secret Garden . By my count, only two lengthy descriptions of exterior environments occur in the novel in which people do not figure, and they occur at the beginning of Chapter V and Chapter X. The narrator takes the reader outside the house and compares it to the Laurence’s mansion, giving us a sense of its exterior (incidentally, as it were).

On one side was an old brown house, looking rather bare and shabby, robbed of

the vines that in summer covered its walls, and the flowers which then surrounded

it. On the other side was a stately stone mansion, plainly betokening every sort of

comfort and luxury from the big coach-house and well-kept grounds to the

conservatory, and the glimpses of lovely things one caught between the rich

curtains. Yet it seemed a lonely, lifeless sort of house; for no children frolicked on

the lawn, no motherly face ever smiled at the windows, and few people went in

and out, except the old gentleman and his grandson. (44)

Her intention is instructive, rather than aesthetic. She describes what the houses look like in order to contrast emotional and material poverty. Similarly, the next description appears at the beginning of Chapter X and serves a functional expositional purpose, rather than a purely descriptive one. She describes the girls’ flower gardens in order to illustrate the differences in their characters (and tells the reader this is what she is doing). Alcott narrates, “Hannah used to 69 say, ‘I'd know which each of them gardings belonged to, ef I see 'em in Chiny,’ and so she might, for the girls' tastes differed as much as their characters” (85).

In Anne of Green Gables , Montgomery consistently uses descriptions of the natural world to introduce or to conclude chapters (as well as elsewhere), and while these descriptions often serve a secondary purpose, usually to align the reader with the narrator’s/Anne’s point of view and to signal her emotional growth, they certainly have aesthetic intent. Montgomery’s artistic interest in and evident enjoyment of the description of nature contrasts with Alcott’s utilitarian

(and infrequent) use of it to serve other narrative strategies. Alcott’s practical interests, and

Montgomery’s aesthetic purposes, are especially apparent in their references to seasonal change or climate. Alcott’s references to months or seasons shift the reader from one point in time to another or answer some plot-exigency—Jo is cross and cannot go out, because it’s raining; Jo is cross and does not wish to go out, because it’s hot and dusty. In Little Women the natural world intrudes upon its characters, who notice it as it affects their daily behavior: to bring an umbrella, to wear your best hat, to go calling, to receive guests, to lie on the grass or to run around, etc. For

Montgomery, on the other hand, tranquil twilights and bright spring days mirror internal states of dreaminess or happiness. They present a particular lens through which characters and readers see the world.

In general, Alcott’s descriptions focus on the characters in scenes where she constructs visual tableaus. The quintessential Little Women scene is probably the opening image of the girls gathered around the fire, with Jo splayed across the rug. Alcott often describes what the girls are wearing, their movements, and how they are posed, describing in detail scenes like Meg’s wedding, Amy’s engagement, home theatricals, family gatherings, and other picturesque events, like the girls sitting in their white dresses on a shady green hill talking about their “castles in the 70 air.” More than either Montgomery or Burnett, Alcott details the physical presence of her characters—their movements, gestures, and relative positions—which resembles dramatic blocking or stage directions and indicates her interest in theater as well as the indistinct boundary for her between drama and fiction. The final scene of the first volume captures this quality:

Father and mother sat together quietly re-living the first chapter of the

romance which for them began some twenty years ago. Amy was drawing the

lovers, who sat apart in a beautiful world of their own…. Beth lay on her sofa

talking cheerily with her old friend, who held her little hand…. Jo lounged in her

favorite low seat…and Laurie, leaning on the back of her chair, his chin on a level

with her curly head…nodded at her in the long glass which reflected them both.

So grouped the curtain falls upon Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Whether it ever

rises again, depends upon the reception given to the first act of the domestic

drama, called “Little Women.” (185)

Likewise, in Jo’s Boys , Alcott concludes the series by letting “the curtain fall forever on the

March family” (278). Throughout the novel, the division into scenes, which have a photographable or portrait-like quality, distinguishes Alcott’s descriptions from those in Anne of

Green Gables and The Secret Garden , whose descriptions develop the interiority of the characters or serve aesthetic purposes as much as they reflect exterior environments.

Conclusion

Little Women is hailed as the original and exemplary text in the genre we recognize today as girl’s fiction. In both characterization and tone, it differed from the popular fiction of writers like Martha Finley or Susan Warner. Featuring adolescent girls with independent and flawed personalities, Little Women began a literary tradition of female ambition, rebellion, and strength 71 with unconventional heroines. Critics have also noted the difference in tone from the earlier texts of female subordination and children’s didactic and evangelical fiction that emphasize religion, morality, and suffering. As Brodhead observed, Alcott brought “mirth to the plot of female domestication,” and her tone demonstrated a deep understanding of her characters’ psychology that replaced the preachy, “overwrought” narrators of other authors (Brodhead 624; Avery,

Behold 170).

From the beginning, the reading public and literary critics positively responded to the voice of energy and decision which addressed the reader from the pages of Little Women . It was direct, unadorned, and simple, just what Alcott intended it to be. She deliberately avoided sentimentalism and relied on the tension and structure of her narrative to deliver pathos and emotional depth. Reviewers bemusedly pondered the appeal of such a plot-less novel and wondered at its perfect blend of humor and tenderness. As the century progressed, however, the very qualities which had prompted such enthusiastic responses—its wholesomeness, its apparent simplicity, its values of family duty and self-reliance—contributed to its disappearance from critical attention. Critics argued that Alcott’s domestic realism was insufficiently challenging or complex; that it was idealized, sentimental, and nostalgic; and that its appeal was limited to women and children. The received cultural disdain for women’s writing, especially when directed to the young, intensified as the twentieth-century progressed until such books were described by the scornful as female melodrama or unrealistic sentimental narratives. Ernest

Hemingway’s comment to Lavinia Russ—“’You’re so full of young sweetness and light you ought to be carrying Little Women ’ (He had never read it.)”—is representative of the kind of uninformed, sexist, elitist perceptions which denied Alcott the serious critical attention she deserved (Clark, Kiddie 107). [Russ, for her part, described Little Women as a story of “grace 72 under pressure” (Eiselein and Phillips, Encyclopedia 70).] Such attitudes contributed to the fact that, when she received critical attention, scholars were interested in rehabilitating her reputation as a female author, and analyses primarily focused on feminist themes in the text and biographical resonances. Such readings often miss the essential reason for Alcott’s success that entitles her to be considered alongside all great American authors: the strength of her narrative voice.

In the following chapters, I will introduce the critical receptions of Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden in order to compare their responses and to demonstrate the consistent appeal of the narrative voice in each novel. To do this, I will also provide an analysis of style, in particular their use of nature in description. Montgomery and Burnett’s descriptive styles have more in common with each other than with Alcott’s, primarily because of the interest in the natural world and the lyrical, psychological, and symbolic development of their environments.

73

Chapter 3: Anne of Green Gables

Nations grow in the eyes of the world less by the work of their statesmen than their artists. Thousands of people all over the globe are hazy about the exact nature of Canada’s government and our relation to the British Empire, but they have clear recollections of Anne of Green Gables. Robertson Davies, Peterborough Examiner

To the chagrin of many, including Davies, who wrote Montgomery’s obituary, Anne of

Green Gables is arguably Canada’s most famous novel. Undoubtedly their annoyance is partially engendered by the ubiquitous Anne franchise, which has turned Prince Edward Island into an international tourist destination and produced numerous theatricals, spin-offs, and kitschy commercial products. But a great deal of it comes from a received cultural disdain for children’s literature, women, and sentimentalism. Jane Urquhart and Mary Henley Rubio cite the passage above from Davies’ obituary in their biographies of Montgomery to illustrate her impact, perhaps with the awareness that such a concession from an antagonistic male novelist and critic validates

Montgomery’s importance. Nevertheless, Davies’ seemingly laudatory beginning proceeds to damn with faint praise as he acknowledges that:

Stern critics may be dismayed that what is probably the best-known book to come

out of Canada should be such a simple and sentimental work. Admittedly it would

have been better if we had produced a Don Quixote or a War and Peace , but in

the world of art we have to be content with what we can get; Canada produced

Anne of Green Gables and that must suffice us for a while. The book has great

charm, and is somewhat reminiscent of the work of Louisa Alcott. Anne never set

the world on fire, and launched no crusade, but she gave a great deal of happiness

of an inoffensive sort. (340-41)

His opinions reveal the typical prejudices associated with children’s fiction outlined in Chapter

One. As Nina Baym, Catherine Stimpson, and Beverly Clark have shown, critics routinely 74 dismiss fiction by female authors about female experience with the criticisms, explicit or implied, that its construction is simple and sentimental and its themes are occasionally amusing, but of little importance (betraying a preference for male authors writing of male experience).

Inevitably, Davies concludes his obituary with much warmer (and unqualified) commendation for Montgomery’s excellence as a clergyman’s wife, but his praise “of an offensive sort” has been anthologized in Montgomery criticism and biographies ever since.

The critique of sentimentality and simplistic themes are not unique to the world of children’s fiction, but were (and may still be) applied to women’s writing in general. The renewed critical interest in L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott in the late twentieth century manifests the desire of feminist critics to restore female authors to the literary canon. It is therefore unsurprising that the preponderance of material written about Montgomery and Alcott deals with feminism for three primary reasons: there is a great burden for children’s literature to present authentic, independent female characters; feminist readings are immediately accessible; and Alcott and Montgomery were strong-minded, successful female authors who led complex, varied lives and left a great deal of material behind them for us to read and analyze, making a discussion of feminism particularly relevant and fruitful. Much of this additional information materialized only recently, prompting more investigations into these authors’ lives and works.

During the 1980s, leading Montgomery scholars Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth

Waterston began to publish five volumes of the Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery , ten years after Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern had discovered and republished Alcott’s pseudonymous and anonymous thrillers. Both Alcott and Montgomery had left self-edited journals, spanning almost the entirety of their lives, as well as correspondence with their families, friends, admirers, and publishers, allowing readers to examine the lives of the women 75 behind iconic Jo March and Anne Shirley. They had repeatedly acknowledged the autobiographical content of their best-known works, and scholars today continue to probe their nonfictional writing in an attempt to understand each author through her fiction and vice-versa .

The publication of the journals and thrillers inspired a great interest in the “darker” side of these authors’ personalities, prompting some critics to disparage their work for children and others to find validation for a darker subtext within the novels. 33

The emergence of this supplementary material invited critics to interpret the novels once again through feminism, trying to determine the authors’ relationship to their writing, their beloved heroines, and the patriarchy. Many have interpreted their stories as therapeutic exercises in wish-fulfillment and willful idealization. Others have approached Anne of Green Gables from the perspective of cultural studies. The enormous commercial success of the “Anne” legacy, which includes a fabricated Green Gables and Avonlea village, numerous adaptations to other media, and products like dolls, cookbooks, and costumes, provoked an enthusiastic investigation of the marketability of Montgomery’s imaginary world. Consonant with this is the cross-cultural appeal of the Anne series and Montgomery’s role in shaping Canadian identity. As with Little

Women , non-native Canadians have written about the importance of Anne of Green Gables to their process of assimilation and inclusion in Canadian culture, while others have criticized the aspects of nationalism, class politics, colonialism, and race within the books. The concentration of topics in current Montgomery scholarship is born out in the titles of recent publications. Three anthologies of Montgomery research published in the last twelve years include articles like:

“Consumable Avonlea: The Commodification of the Green Gables Mythology”; “Anne in

Hollywood: The Americanization of a Canadian Icon”; “Anne in a ‘Globalized’ World: Nation,

33 According to Ruth K. MacDonald, Martha Saxton’s and Brigid Brophy’s biographies of Alcott evince a critical disdain for her children’s work. Other critics also express a preference for her “apocryphal” stories (27). 76

Nostalgia, and Postcolonial Perspectives of Home”; “Anne of Red Hair: What Do the Japanese

See in Anne of Green Gables ?”; “Montgomery, Popular Literature, Life Writing”; “L.M.

Montgomery and Maternal Feminism in Canada”; “Feminist Narrative Ethics in Anne of Green

Gables ”; and “Safe Pleasures for Girls: L.M. Montgomery’s Erotic Landscapes.” 34

Despite the popularity of cultural, biographical, and feminist approaches to Anne of

Green Gables , there is more critical material addressing Montgomery’s technique as a writer than exists for Alcott. Montgomery, unlike Alcott, was not averse to a consciously literary style and regularly poeticized her prose, as becomes clear from the very first page of Anne of Green

Gables .35 Before revisiting this criticism, I would like to explore the critical response to Anne at the time of its publication, as well as the novel’s relation to Little Women in the public consciousness.

Jo and Anne, Louisa and Maud: Critical Responses and Literary Connections

Anne of Green Gables was written in seven months during 1905 and was published in

1908. Her immediate success was followed by a demand for more books in the same style. She wrote seven sequels in the “Anne” series before her death in 1942, and her other novels and short stories shared many of the same characteristics, incidents, and settings. 36 Like Alcott,

Montgomery felt hampered by her professional identity as the author of Anne and rebelled against her label as a children’s author. She continued to produce material in the style of Anne her entire life, just as Alcott wrote two sequels and other children’s stories in the style of Little

34 From Making Avonlea , edited by Irene Gammel; L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture , edited by Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly; and Anne’s World , edited by Gammel and Benjamin Lefebvre. 35 Montgomery published more than 500 poems in her lifetime and was an avid reader (and memorizer) of Scott, Tennyson, Longfellow, Wordsworth, Browning, Mrs. Hemans, Whittier, and Macaulay. Nature is often the source of her most poetic descriptions, and this close communion with the natural world is notably missing from pragmatic (and likely disillusioned) Alcott’s Little Women . This Transcendentalist’s daughter focused on material concerns and left spirituality to develop through experience and human relationships rather than through connections with nature. 36 Only two of her novels were not set in Prince Edward Island: Jane of Lantern Hill and A Blue Castle . Critics often identify these two novels (and sometimes A Tangled Web ) as her “adult” books. In fact, the latter half of Montgomery’s adult life was spent in Ontario, where she moved after her marriage at age 36. 77

Women .37 She also assumed a public posture of humility, an insistence that she had no pretensions to literary greatness. After Anne was accepted for publication (and had been rejected three times), Montgomery referenced it for the first time in her journal on August 16, 1907:

…there has not been much to write about and I’ve been very busy and

contented. Since spring came I haven’t been dismal and life has been endurable

and—by spells—pleasant.

One really important thing has come my way since my last entry. On April

15 th I received a letter from the L.C. Page Co. of Boston accepting the MS of a

book I had sent them and offering to publish it on a royalty basis! (283)

The news that her first novel had been accepted for publication is related incidentally, in an unassuming, even naïve tone of pleasant surprise. The book was Anne of Green Gables , a manuscript she had worked on for several months two years prior and that was born of an idea she had recorded in her journal ten years before: “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them” (284). The unelaborated plot idea lay dormant for ten years until Montgomery, chancing to find it again as she searched for fresh material, spontaneously decided to turn it into a novel. In her journal (which she intended to be published after her death), she regards her literary success as born of a lucky impulse, not inspiration, and describes the experience of writing it without reference to difficulty, skill, or artistry. Instead, her work was described as a “labor of love.”

37 Rubio writes in the introduction to her biography that Montgomery’s “astonishing success encouraged [her] to maintain the tone, style, and themes that had created a worldwide circle of devotees” (12). While remunerative, it was also frustrating. Rubio continues: “If her novels contain hidden rebellion, her journals pulse with open resistance, resentment, and depression at the structures of daily life that caught her ambition in cobwebs. She felt trapped in her marriage, confined by motherhood, and bound by the need to present a smiling face of domestic happiness in accord with the romantic novels she was producing. She was fettered by her own popularity and by the need to maintain her success in order to supplement her husband’s income as a poorly paid country parson” (13). 78

Nothing I have ever written gave me so much pleasure to write. I cast ‘moral’ and

‘Sunday School’ ideals to the winds and made my ‘Anne’ a real human girl.

Many of my own childhood experiences and dreams were worked up into its

chapters. Cavendish scenery supplied the background and Lover’s Lane figures

very prominently. There is plenty of incident in it but after all it must stand or fall

by ‘Anne’. She is the book. (284)

Montgomery, who had read and enjoyed Little Women , seems to be channeling Jo March in this passage, who had also decided to dispense with “Sunday School ideals” and write from the heart, using her own childhood experiences to create a credible adolescent girl. Montgomery’s final sentence, that there is “plenty of incident,” but that the book “must stand or fall by ‘Anne’” echoes the reviews Little Women received, which appreciated both the plenitude of “incident” and the brilliant characterization that provoked such strong emotional attachments to the novel.

Other reviews similarly praised the “wholesome and attractive” story, told in “a style direct and pleasing” ( Spectator 337; English-Canadian Literature 339). Readers responded to the

“irresistible drollery,” “the scores of happy touches and diverting incidents,” and the “ludicrous and touching” scenes ( Globe 336; Spectator 338; Spectator 338). Critics who were “weary of problems” (with Alcott they were weary of “ideas”) found much to their liking in this story with

“no pretensions to a great plot” ( Spectator 337; Macdonald 16; Globe 336). Instead, they appreciated the “mental and spiritual growth vividly set forth in these genial pages” ( Spectator

338), and the reviewer for the Globe already quoted asserted:

…this simple story of rural life in Canada will be read and re-read when many of

the more pretentious stories are all forgotten. There is not a dull page in the whole 79

volume, and the comedy and tragedy are so deftly woven together that it is at

times difficult to divide them. (336)

With the exception of the reference to Canada, these comments may easily be construed as referring to Little Women , published forty years earlier in New England and celebrated for its human appeal.

The main observations which distinguish the response to Anne from the earlier reception of Little Women emphasize the novel’s location. The reviews discussed setting as much as character. The critic from the Globe began his commentary with an awkwardly unbalanced introduction: “…from the first line to the last the reader is fascinated by the sayings and doings of the girl child taken from a Nova Scotia home, adopted by the old Scotch maid and bachelor, brother and sister, who owned Green Gables, a Prince Edward Island farm, situated in one of the garden spots of the beautiful Island Province in the St. Lawrence Gulf.” The setting of the story is given equal weight to the description of the plot. The reviewer concludes with an ambitiously poetic homage to the author that again references the significance of setting:

The story is told by an author who knows the Island of Prince Edward thoroughly,

and who has carefully observed the human tide which flows through that Island,

as it does over all places where human beings live. With the pen of an artiste she

has painted that tide so that its deep tragedies are just lightly revealed, for she

evidently prefers to show us the placid flow, with its steadiness, its sweetness, and

witchery, until the reader stands still to watch the play of sunshine and shadow as

it is deftly pictured by the hand of the author of Anne of Green Gables . (336-7)

This certainly is not a response Alcott’s writing would have encouraged. Its content is nevertheless applicable: Alcott was praised for her realistic depiction of human nature as well as 80 for her ability to capture the “sunshine and shadow” of daily life using gentle wit and tender tragedy. The flowery praise the Globe writer bestows on Montgomery, however, responds to a departure in form, if not necessarily in content. Alcott eschewed a consciously literary style, while Montgomery cultivated her role as an “artiste,” inscribing each page with a poetic description of nature, literary allusion, or deliberate manipulation of language to produce a desired effect. The direct, unadorned prose Alcott favored was praised for its power and vividness; Montgomery’s writing was remembered for its beauty and intensity of perception.

The narrative voice in each novel elides with the protagonist’s own voice, creating a palpable sympathy and intimacy between narrator and character. Gillian Avery’s study of the

American heroine identifies this connection between author and subject as the factor which determines a novel’s success. She writes that readers “instinctively recognize” an author’s sincerity and pleasure in writing (20). The emotional investment of the author extends beyond her relationship with her heroine to a profound connection with place. Even books which fail to elicit sympathy with the characters may compel through the narrator’s evocation of place. Of the once popular The Wide, Wide World Avery writes: “it is the account of rural life in upstate New

York that makes it so readable. Miss Warner, who herself lived on Constitution Island on the

Hudson River opposite West Point, depicted this with the same love as Miss Sedgewick had brought to her account of the Berkshires” (13). Avery implies that even books lacking good characterization or a compelling story are redeemable through the author’s sense of place and skill as a regional writer. Anne of Green Gables combines the sustaining force of a vivid and memorable heroine with a lovingly-rendered account of life in a small Prince Edward Island village. 81

A reviewer from the Spectator wrote: “Miss Montgomery has not merely succeeded in winning our sympathies for her dramatis personae ; she makes us fall in love with their surroundings, and long to visit the Lake of Shining Waters, the White Way of Delight, Idlewild, and other favourite resorts of ‘the Anne-girl’” (337). Almost a hundred years later, Elizabeth

Epperly, one of the first modern scholars to pay serious critical attention to Montgomery’s writing, observed:

Montgomery’s/Anne’s/the narrator’s love affair with Prince Edward

Island…offers us hope that even a mature Anne, who has dropped the endearing

verbal eccentricities of her childhood, will have a loving vitality great enough to

sustain continued reading about her. (348)

Epperly and the writer for the Spectator see Montgomery’s appeal as a product of characterization and setting related through a narrative voice that conveys a deep, “loving vitality” for person and place.

This loving vitality is present in Little Women as well, but Alcott’s relationship to place is less central and consists of regional, moral, and class identity rather than a physical connection to landscape. Readers, especially those without access to a New England heritage, are very responsive to her portrayal of genteel New England family life. Like orphaned Laurie, who

“can’t help looking over at [the March’s] house,” Jo gives the reader leave not only “to look as much as you like,” but to “come over and see us” (46). Forty years later Anne of Green Gables offered a similar passage to belonging. Janice Fiamengo argues that the reader gains possession of Avonlea in a process parallel to Anne’s. She writes: “an imaginative little girl gains the right to claim a home on the strength of her longing; in the absence of right of occupancy, family connection, or economic power, the force of her love makes it hers” (225). The invitation to 82 access these places has proved irresistible for generations of readers, regardless of the removal in time and space. 38

Despite the distinctiveness of their narrative voices, Anne and Little Women share many qualities. The two novels portray the realistic experiences of an adolescent girl in a defined community. Since the publication of Anne of Green Gables in 1908, critics have compared the two novels. Contemporary critics as well as modern scholars identify Little Women as Anne ’s predecessor; in 1908 the Spectator announced that “Miss Montgomery has given us a most enjoyable and delightful book…in direct lineal descent from the works of Miss Alcott” (338).

Carol Gay observed: “Montgomery took the female protagonist and with the realism that Alcott had pioneered, created a worthy successor to Jo March” (qtd. in Foster and Simons 165). While their personalities are very different, Anne and Jo are believable as young girls leading ordinary lives. Without the sentimentalism, idealization, or didacticism of previous domestic fiction, they developed as autonomous and highly individual characters relatively unconstrained by expectations of typical female behavior. Jo, “bold, outspoken, brave, daring, loyal, cranky, principled, and real,” seems to be a long way from sensitive, imaginative, and eager Anne, but critics have usually focused on their similarities rather than their differences (Reisen 2).

Structurally, both novels are chronologically episodic, with chapters often occurring in groups or pairs. Both Montgomery and Alcott preferred the first part of their narratives, which they considered stronger than the conclusions. Neither author was eager to resolve their novels, betraying a greater interest in the episodes rather than any linear progression to a specific point.

38 Anne especially commands an international audience. Poland and Japan in particular have adopted her, a phenomenon that has inspired several essays. The appeal of Anne transcends literal landscapes, however, for as Fiamengo observes in her essay “Towards a Theory of the Popular Landscape,” Avonlea, although based on small PEI towns, is really a mythical place and a “portable landscape” (228). Fiamengo says that “it is both the one place and no place at all” (237). Montgomery’s descriptions are not specific or particular to Prince Edward Island; rather they convey “a joyful affinity with the natural world” (232). 83

Like Alcott, Montgomery developed her episodic style writing for serial or periodical publications like magazines, Sunday school periodicals, and women’s journals. Rea

Wilmshurst’s bibliography of Montgomery’s works include early titles like “A New-Fashioned

Flavoring,” “The Way of the Winning of Anne,” “What Came of a Dare,” and “Diana’s

Wedding-Dress,” suggesting that she reworked some of her early material for use in her novel, as did Alcott (Waterston “To the World” 414). Montgomery then arranged these episodes to form a narrative pattern consisting of an “eight chapter entry, twenty chapter unfolding, eight chapter apparent denouement, and a surprising two-chapter reversal” (“To the World” 419-20). The sections correspond with Anne’s arrival and her disruption of orderly Avonlea society; her efforts to belong; her acceptance into that society; and Matthew’s death and her decision to remain in Avonlea. The story arc of Little Women is determined by time rather than an overarching quest or journey. Alcott arranges the chapters according to her sense of suspense, her desire to balance comedy and pathos, the need to address each sister’s life, and thematic connections. The content of the chapters are even similar. There are obvious parallels: the deaths of Beth and Matthew; the episodes of explosive temper; the rejection of romantic involvement; the domestic “scrapes,” especially Anne flavoring a cake with liniment and Jo seasoning the strawberries with salt; Anne’s humiliation at the hands of a male teacher and her subsequent withdrawal from school; Anne and Jo cutting off their hair; and the satire of moral, sensational, or romantic literature. 39

39 There are subtle similarities as well. Anne wills her pearl ring to Diana in the case of her death, and Amy wills her pearl ring to Beth. Anne and Jo run for exercise and enjoyment. Like Meg, Anne feels self-conscious in her best clothes, which are simple and become her, but seem provincial and cheap when surrounded by the finery of wealthier, shallower women. Finally, some chapter titles in Anne of Green Gables invoke lines of poetry from various sources, and in Little Women some chapter titles invoke The Pilgrim’s Progress . In general, however, Montgomery’s titles often function on an ironic level, and are sometimes less informative (before reading the chapter) than Alcott’s two to three-word subject lines.

84

The similarities between the two works, especially those arising from parallel experiences, make an examination of differences in style particularly significant.

Montgomery’s/Anne’s voice distinguishes Anne of Green Gables from Little Women , and it is the uniqueness of the voice which makes the book so memorable. Both Little Women and Anne of Green Gables have inspired intense affection among their readers for their presentation of girlhood and adolescence seen through the eyes of the older self as well as the young girl.

Style

Alcott favored a simple, direct style that shifted from frank, conversational dialogue to straightforward narration and equally simple direct address or asides. Her style conveys power, sincerity, and immediacy; she creates a sense of unmediated access to her thoughts, events, and characters. Montgomery once expressed a similar preference for a simple style, “When you become conscious of a writer’s technique that writer has reached the point of danger…. Carried too far, technique becomes annoying as mannerisms” (qtd. in Haire-Sargaent 156). Yet

Montgomery’s careful crafting of Anne’s speeches and her own narrative discourse suggest that technique was an essential, deliberate component of her writing, even if it does not obtrude upon the reader’s consciousness. She heavily mediates her narrative through technique, particularly through framing the novel’s perspective. Elizabeth Epperly writes, “Everything in the novel conspires to make us hear Anne’s voice and to understand her point of view” (351). Montgomery uses voice, humor, and description to invite the reader to share in Anne’s perspective.

Intimate Connections: Maud and Anne, Voice and Nature

The voice of the narrator aligns with Anne’s voice (and with the voices of other characters) and establishes a separate presence. Montgomery’s identification with Anne and connection with her voice is at once a technical and natural achievement. Like Alcott’s relation 85 to Jo, Montgomery’s Anne is an incarnation of her younger self. Many of the incidents, settings, and characters of the book are transformations of the events, people, and places from her childhood. 40 Montgomery was essentially an orphan, left in the care of unaffectionate, judgmental grandparents, and she always felt the difference between herself and others. The deep emotional connection between the narrator and the heroine is rooted in her hunger for love and acceptance. Margaret Atwood believes that the power of Montgomery’s narrative stems from this personal connection: “Anne’s experience of exclusion was undoubtedly hers; the longing for acceptance must have been hers as well. So was the lyricism; so was the sense of injustice; so was the rebellious rage” (224). Elizabeth Waterston eloquently describes the appeal of this connection:

There is also a reflection here of the relation between herself, a writer in her

thirties (feeling old and wise) and the child she once was. That little girl still

flitted through her memories, bright, articulate, ecstatic in response to her

environment. As Montgomery wrote, she became increasingly certain of what

kind of a child she had been. Perhaps she also came to guess how interesting such

a child could be to older readers, restoring to them their own capacity for wonder

and freshness. ( Magic Island 13)

In her journals Montgomery described the emotional starvation of her childhood and her frequent conflicts with her controlling, volatile grandfather and strict, unsympathetic grandmother. As a sensitive and articulate child, she felt their sarcasm and coldness acutely. Writing Anne of Green

40 For instance, Muriel Stacy, Anne’s beloved teacher, is based on Montgomery’s teacher and role model, Hattie Gordon. The basis for Anne’s antagonistic relationship with Gilbert is a fellow pupil named Austin Laird, a boy she teased for his red hair. Avonlea and Green Gables are based on her family’s home in Cavendish. Names appearing in the novel are taken from family or regional history. “Lover’s Lane” exists, and is where Montgomery thought out her stories. (Alcott too liked to plan out her stories mentally before beginning to write.) Perhaps most significantly, like Anne, Montgomery received a teacher’s license and attended university (although she did not receive a degree). 86

Gables allowed her to give Anne the love and approval she longed for and never received. In a poignant journal entry dated three years after Anne ’s publication, she wrote:

When I am asked if Anne herself is a ‘real person’ I always answer ‘no’ with an

odd reluctance and an uncomfortable feeling of not telling the truth. For she is and

always has been, from the moment I first thought of her, so real to me that I feel I

am doing violence to something when I deny her an existence anywhere save in

Dreamland. Does she not stand at my elbow even now—if I turned my head

quickly should I not see her—with her eager, starry eyes and her long braids of

red hair and her little pointed chin?...She is so real that, although I’ve never met

her, I feel quite sure I shall do so some day…I shall lift my eyes and find her,

child or maiden, by my side. And I shall not be in the least surprised because I

have always known she was somewhere . (288)

Readers who wish to read Anne as a better-loved version of Maud have no more poignant evidence than this. Regardless of how one chooses to interpret this, one intuitively senses their intimate relationship and implicitly trusts in Anne’s realness.

From a technical perspective, Montgomery elides her point of view and Anne’s primarily through Anne’s quaint speeches and poetic description. Montgomery confessed that she preferred to write in the first-person, because “it then seems easier to live my story as I write it…. I often write a story in the first person and then rewrite it, shifting to the third” (qtd. in

Haire-Sargaent 156). Anne’s long and frequent speeches allow Montgomery to retain the first- person for a significant portion of the narrative, and when she transitions to her own voice, she retains Anne’s sensitivity to beauty. Critics have written extensively on the role of nature in Anne of Green Gables, noting that it allows Montgomery to connect with Anne’s voice and also that 87 nature possesses thematic significance. Elizabeth R. Epperly’s essay “Romancing the Voice,” from her highly-regarded book on Montgomery, The Fragrance of Sweet Grass (1992), analyzes

Montgomery’s narrative technique. She writes:

What characterizes all the descriptions is their humanness, their invitation to

participate in a kind of communion. The descriptive passages are not just vivid

ornaments to the narrative, but are instead expressions of attitude, indexes of the

observers’ ability to join the spirit of love and the pursuit of beauty that

characterize Anne’s quest for identity and home. The humanness of the

descriptions is evident not only in personification…, but in the tenderness of

appreciation… (351)

According to Epperly, the descriptions of nature actively shape the point of view of the narrative.

In addition, they establish a connection between “the pursuit of beauty” and the central “quest for identity and home.” Rosemary Ross Johnston, in her keynote address at the 2004 Montgomery

Conference in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, argued that the “interiorization” of the landscape is essential to understanding the protagonist’s and narrator’s “subjectivity” and is central to the theme of seeking home. She says:

First, for Montgomery landscape is always relational , an intimate part of the

subjectivity of her protagonists, and an intimate part of her own writerly

subjectivity. Anne interiorizes the beauty of the natural exterior world, dances

with it, and reproduces it as she moves through the often less-beautiful world of

people. (411)

For Epperly and Johnston, and numerous other critics and lay readers, the magic of Anne of

Green Gables resides in Anne’s “exuberant vision” and the reader’s ability to partake of this 88 vision (Shields 428). The novel encourages readers to internalize, as Anne does, the beauty of the world around her.

Montgomery’s writing also encourages the reader to correlate the appreciation of nature with the personal significance of home. Johnston continues: “Montgomery’s landscapes, cosmic as they are, have as their central locus the idea of home, and the powerful associations of coming home, finding home, making home, are part of her ideology of home as ontological beingness”

(411). Montgomery introduces this connection between home and nature in the very first line of the novel when she personifies a brook that runs past Rachel Lynde’s door. The reader meets

Avonlea before Anne does, and consequently we know what she is anxiously waiting to find.

The novel begins:

Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a

little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook

that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was

reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those

woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s

Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run

past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it

probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a

sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks to children up, and that if she

noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted

out the whys and wherefores thereof. (7)

Epperly, in fact, begins her analysis of Anne of Green Gables with an explication of this

“energetic one-hundred-and-forty-eight-word-long sentence, divided by three semi-colons,” 89 which is an impressive example of Montgomery’s writing style and her ability to humorously layer different meanings within the text. Epperly identifies the four major viewpoints this sentence manages to convey:

(1) Rachel Lynde and her demand for propriety and knowledge, (2) the brook’s

secret, free, and then regulated movements and its consciousness of Mrs. Rachel’s

vigilance, (3) the narrator’s view of Mrs. Rachel’s demands on the brook and the

inhabitants of Avonlea and the brook’s and inhabitants apparent conformity, (4)

the reader’s invited understanding of Mrs. Rachel’s vigilance, the brook’s

apparent conformity, and the narrator’s amusement over Mrs. Rachel, the brook,

and the inhabitants who conform with or defy Mrs. Rachel Lynde. (344)

The sentence contributes to the excitement and dramatic irony of later chapters as the brook foreshadows an impending disruption of orderly Avonlea society. The sentence also personalizes place and invites the reader to associate Anne with the happy, free, and bright aspects of nature, an association made even stronger when Montgomery introduces Marilla, who awaits Anne sitting in a darkened corner, “always slightly distrustful of sunshine” (10). The familiarity and complexity of this introduction enforces the identification between place and subjectivity which

Johnston refers to. She explains, “…landscape is deeply, profoundly, spiritual, imbricated with what Montgomery often refers to as ‘soul’, and this spirituality becomes part of what Bal calls the ‘deep structure’ of the text; as, in her words, place is ‘thematized…[it] becomes an acting place rather than a place of action” (411). The personified, personalized brook, which helps construct the identity of Avonlea and of Anne, is the first example of this.

Johnston concludes her address with an analysis of the controversial final line of the novel. Anne has decided to remain at Green Gables to assist Marilla instead of attending 90

Redmond College, and as she contemplates “the bend in the road” before her, she quote’s Robert

Browning’s “Pippa,” “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world” (245). Frank Davey and other critics have maintained that, like Browning, Montgomery intended some irony here directed at “a young woman’s continuing optimism” and have cited the ending as her capitulation to a woman’s prescriptive role of caretaker (385). Johnston proposes instead that

Anne’s reverie (as she gazes out her window) is calm and hopeful. She says, “there is a looking outwards that constitutes a deep looking inwards, and a deep peace related to a decision about home” (412). Montgomery’s descriptions of the natural world are essential to understanding her internal landscapes and Anne’s “quest for identity and home.” The failure to acknowledge the consistent, inextricable connection between the natural world and the point of view of the novel may lead one to dismiss its joy and resilience for cynicism. As Waterston points out, Anne’s decision to remain at home is not the renunciation of her ambition (she studies at home and eventually attends Redmond College) and is not motivated by duty, but by personal feeling.

Anne stays to save the home she waited so long to find.

Epperly’s and Johnston’s analyses demonstrate the significance of the descriptions in the text, and Epperly proceeds to show how these natural descriptions align the narrator’s voice with

Anne’s, so that “we come to identify [Anne] with the broader, thoughtful view of the narrator’s descriptions, just as we hear in their poetry her rapture with beauty” (351). She argues that

“Montgomery was using poetry as a means to initiate the reader into a way of seeing the world,” and points out that “three-quarters of the novel’s nature descriptions…are offered as though through Anne’s eyes” (352). In many cases, Montgomery uses free indirect discourse to relay

Anne’s thoughts without clearly distinguishing between her language and Anne’s. For example, when Anne leaves the hotel at White Sands, Montgomery writes: 91

Anne breathed deeply, and looked into the clear sky beyond the dark

boughs of the firs.

Oh, it was good to be out again in the purity and silence of the night! How

great and still and wonderful everything was, with the murmur of the sea

sounding through it and the darkling cliffs beyond like grim giants guarding

enchanted coasts. (218)

The description is offered as Anne’s ecstatic response to nature, whether silently articulated or a verbal expression of what she is feeling. But Anne’s verbal descriptions of nature are never this polished or literary. Anne’s spoken attempts to incorporate poetic description are often comically misused, hyperbolic, or absurdly out of place. Her internal reflections, like the one above, are offered seriously and replicate Montgomery’s own descriptive style. For instance, midway through the novel, Montgomery describes a spring evening to explain Marilla’s state of mind:

Marilla was not given to subjective analysis of her thoughts and feelings. She

probably imagined that she was thinking about the Aids and their missionary box

and the new carpet for the vestry-room, but under these reflections was a

harmonious consciousness of red fields smoking into pale-purply mists in the

declining sun, of long, sharp-pointed fir shadows falling over the meadow beyond

the brook, of still, crimson-budded maples around a mirror-like wood-pool, of a

wakening in the world and a stir of hidden pulses under the gray sod. (171)

Prosaic Marilla could not articulate such a description even if she were “given to subjective analysis of her thoughts and feelings.” Montgomery subtly asserts her presence in her colorful description of a spring evening and attributes a subconscious comprehension of that beauty to

Marilla. The language of the description corresponds to the description presented as though 92 through Anne’s eyes. Conversely, Montgomery invokes Anne when the narrator describes the famous elocutionist who performs at the concert. Montgomery writes, “She was a lithe, dark- eyed woman in a wonderful gown of shimmering gray stuff like woven moonbeams, with gems on her neck and in her dark hair” (216). The frequency of these descriptions and the ambiguity of the identity of the author encourages the reader to identify Anne with her narrator and to see the world from their joint perspective of joyful, transcendent beauty.

Humor and Subversion

But she had, as I have told you, the glimmerings of a sense of humour—which is simply another name for a sense of the fitness of things… L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Montgomery constructs a narrative consciousness that exists apart from Anne’s youthful enthusiasms and tragedies. Foster and Simons defend Anne of Green Gables from the charge that it is

merely a straightforward and unsophisticated representation of a pre-adolescent

world. The subtlety of the novel’s narrative technique, relying on the

juxtaposition of Anne’s own viewpoint and a more objective voice reminding the

reader that the Edenic state of girlhood is only temporary, presupposes an

intellectually mature readership. (152)

The separation of the narrator’s consciousness from Anne’s permits Montgomery to satirize society, deconstruct narrative conventions, and subvert adult authority, which she accomplishes without bitterness, using Anne’s youthful optimism and eagerness as a space in which to deliver her criticisms. There are three primary sources of comedy within the novel: Anne’s funny speeches and others’ reactions to them; Anne’s triumphs in her conflicts with adults; and Anne’s received notions of romance. 93

Anne herself is never ridiculed; as Epperly points out “the imitations of Anne’s thinking are the serious, poetic descriptions of nature…. Anne belongs either with serious poetry or with straightforward comedy where she is an actor” (345). As in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , the child is never the object of humor; rather he or she exposes the hypocrisies, inconsistencies, and failures of the social codes that bind him or her. Foster and Simons write: “Anne’s honesty triumphs by exploiting and demolishing the narrow-visioned adult morality which seeks to impose on it; like Huck Finn, she acts according to a pragmatism which, without theorizing, radically questions and judges ostensible righteousness” (168). “…Her code of values is prioritized over [the adults’],” and in confrontations with adult authority, “we invariably side with Anne rather than with her older opponent” (Foster and Simons 159; MacLulich 392).

Montgomery explicitly identifies Anne as the vehicle of her criticism, as a sort of child prophet who intuits and expresses the unspoken feelings that must be repressed in order to maintain these social codes. She writes:

Marilla felt helplessly that all this should be sternly reproved, but she was

hampered by the undeniable fact that some of the things Anne had said…were

what she herself had really thought deep down in her heart for years, but had

never given expression to. It almost seemed to her that those secret, unuttered,

critical thoughts had suddenly taken visible and accusing shape and form in the

person of this outspoken morsel of neglected humanity. (72)

The social codes Anne upsets are usually related to religion, gender, judgmental attitudes, and the restrictiveness of a rural Presbyterian community. One of the most memorable episodes in the book is Anne’s scrape involving her iconic red hair. Juliet McMaster writes: 94

Anne’s flaming red hair is her visible and identifying sign: it is what gives her her

mythopoetic power and makes the helpless orphan denizen of a small Canadian

island a heroine for all seasons and climes, ‘popular’ in the widest sense. Her red

hair is her Achille’s heel, her Waterloo, her fatal flaw, her touch of nature that

‘makes the whole world kin.’ (402)

Anne’s red hair is her endearing and enduring quality; it makes her unique and memorable. As

McMaster points out, everyone knows what it’s like to have a defective body part. Probably everyone knows what it’s like to want to change it, too. Characteristically, however, Anne’s experiment goes badly, and she dyes her hair green. The ethical charge surrounding a girl’s decision to alter her appearance artificially guarantees that such an experiment would go awry; but with other authors this consequence would be conceived as a cosmic punishment for a transgressive act, whereas Montgomery is clearly enjoying herself. She has Anne deliver one of her characteristic speeches:

Oh, I feel that my heart is broken. This is such an unromantic affliction. The girls

in books lose their hair in fevers or sell it to get money for some good deed, and

I’m sure I wouldn’t mind losing my hair in some such fashion half so much. 41 But

there is nothing comforting in having your hair cut off because you’ve dyed it a

dreadful colour, is there? I’m going to weep all the time you’re cutting it off, if it

won’t interfere. It seems such a tragic thing. 176

Marilla, whose emotional repression and notions of child-rearing Montgomery almost always undermines, stands dumbfounded, rather than righteous, before a tragic Anne. Marilla asks her if she knew “it was a wicked thing to do,” but she subconsciously classes Anne’s vanity with her other mistakes—like flavoring the cake with liniment and setting Diana drunk—rather

41 Think Little Women . 95 than with true badness—like lying or selfishness. Anne explains, “I thought it was worth while to be a little wicked to get rid of red hair. I counted the cost, Marilla. Besides, I meant to be extra good in other ways to make up for it” (174). Anne tells her that when she “saw the dreadful colour it turned my hair I repented of being wicked, I can tell you. And I’ve been repenting ever since” (175). Anne repents because it does not work; she considers her actions from a purely utilitarian perspective. Through Anne, Montgomery reacts against a strict morality that imbues

Anne’s insecurity about her hair with dire significance. McMaster writes:

Anne’s intense sensitivity about her hair and its color is part of her developed

awareness of the multitudinous social codes and taboos, popular and otherwise,

with which her culture surrounds her. What she reads and is taught, what people

say and imply, the whole apparatus of social approval that is distinct from moral

and religious systems though coexisting with them: all this Anne absorbs and

reflects with a vividness beyond the reach of more prosaic souls like Marilla and

Diana. (402)

The episode of the green hair is more than a funny “scrape” or a dismissal of unreasonable moral sanctions; it reveals the hypocrisy of a society that criticizes her red hair (the most overt examples are Mrs. Rachel Lynde and Gilbert Blythe), yet censures her for wanting to change it.

Anne’s observation that green hair is not a very romantic affliction brings attention to the other frequent use of humor in the novel—the deconstruction of romance. Anne chooses to romanticize ordinary places, events, and people or to invent material when it is lacking in order to cope with a bleak, uninspiring life. From the very beginning Montgomery makes it clear that

Anne’s imagination is her refuge and her power; it is the only means she has of controlling the environment around her and shaping it to satisfy her needs. Many of her imaginings rely for their 96 substance on romantic literature that she tries to import into her own life, resulting in an

“impossible intensity” of feeling, hyperbolic language, the confusion of words and meanings, sentimentalism, and self-dramatization (Epperly 347). Montgomery uses Anne’s conception of romance to “assert the superior claims of reality, which ‘with its sharp stakes, tears the bottom out of barges’” (Ahmansson 379). As Anne assimilates into society and begins to feel secure, she gradually loses the need to transform herself or her surroundings into something other than what they are (MacLulich 394). Ahmansson writes, “What really remains of Anne’s imaginative powers is her ability to discern beauty in the commonplace in order to make her world a better place” (379).

Anne’s sense of herself as performing a role is what makes her flights of fancy so amusing and distinguish her from heroines in romance plots or sentimental fiction. Anne’s self- awareness fuels Montgomery’s subversion of conventional narrative tropes. Foster and Simons, comparing Anne of Green Gables to Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World , notice the different ways the authors describe grief or rage. They analyze Anne’s tantrum when Marilla denies her the privilege of attending the Sunday school picnic. “Anne realized that Marilla was not to be moved. She clasped her hands together, gave a piercing shriek, and then flung herself face downwards on the bed, crying and writhing in an utter abandonment of disappointment and despair” (Montgomery 85). Foster and Simons write: “Anne is genuinely grief-stricken and, at the same time, alert to the histrionic role-playing of her response; she is self-aware in a way that

Ellen never is, and can thus parody her own emotional outburst” (167). Without lessening the reader’s sympathy, Montgomery demonstrates the exaggeration of Anne’s emotional response.

The other occasions on which Anne cries, either when she has no audience or when her grief is deep enough to be inexpressible, Montgomery truncates her description and eliminates all irony 97 and self-consciousness. For instance, on Anne’s first night at Green Gables, when she learns that she is to be sent back to the orphan asylum, Montgomery writes, “And up-stairs, in the east gable, a lonely, heart-hungry, friendless child cried herself to sleep” (31).

The preceding sentence is about as close as Montgomery ever comes to expressing sentiment unleavened by humor or irony. Like Alcott, she often defuses the “potential pathos of a situation,” while conveying the essential point (Foster and Simons 156). For example, when

Anne accidentally serves Diana alcohol and Mrs. Barry prohibits their friendship, Diana tells her that she will always love her. Anne responds, “Why, Diana, I didn’t think anybody could love me. Nobody ever has loved me since I can remember. Oh, this is wonderful! It’s a ray of light which will forever shine on the darkness of a path severed from thee, Diana. Oh, just say it once again” (110). Anne’s absurd speech provokes a smile along with the sobering reflection that she has indeed been unloved and uncared for since infancy. The emotional climax of the book, however, is delivered without any mediating humor or distracting language. When Matthew dies,

Anne does not cry until she is alone in her room. Like Marmee hearing Jo cry in Little Women after Beth’s death, Marilla hears Anne and comes to comfort her. She says:

Oh, Anne, I know I’ve been kind of strict and harsh with you maybe—but you

mustn’t think I didn’t love you as well as Matthew did, for all that. I want to tell

you now when I can. It’s never been easy for me to say things out of my heart, but

at times like this it’s easier. I love you as dear as if you were my own flesh and

blood and you’ve been my joy and comfort ever since you came to Green Gables.

(235)

Marilla and Anne have both achieved what they have been struggling to find since the beginning of the novel. Marilla’s emotional release finally satisfies Anne’s longing to be loved and valued, 98 and Anne and Marilla have each found the family neither of them ever had. Margaret Atwood writes that “each of them saves the other,” Marilla from becoming “joyless, bereft, trapped, hopeless, unloved,” and Anne from loneliness and neglect (226).

Conclusion

Readers and critics associate Little Women and Anne of Green Gables because they are versions of a female Bildungsroman which feature unconventional heroines characterized by a simultaneous independence and intense love of home. Jo matures to adulthood in Little Women , and Anne only makes it to age fifteen, at which point the sequels take over, but her quest for home and the identity it gives her is completed. As with Jo, the death of a loved one (who is gentle rather than spirited) precedes the conclusion of her development, and by the end of the novel, her character has been pruned and tamed, or “socialized,” to allow her to take her place in the adult world. Jo’s maturation is much more fraught and brooding than Anne’s, which is partially attributable to the forty-year difference in their periods of publication. No doubt the difference is also occasioned by the distinct personalities and intentions of the authors, one of whom was admittedly chronicling her own life very closely, while the other was writing the childhood she wished she had had.

Appropriately, the narrative voices differ as much as the girls’ personalities. The direct, matter-of-fact tone adopted by Alcott contrasts with the lyrical, sensitive voice of Montgomery.

Both were described as energetic and lively, however, and critics praised each one for their humor, their pathos, and the authenticity and sincerity of emotion. Each author freely infused their protagonists’ voices with their own, a reflection of the autobiographical relationship between the characters and their authors. They both wrote in the style of realism, and their chronological episodic chapters detail familiar domestic events. Montgomery, unlike Alcott, 99 developed a writing style replete with poetic imagery, literary language and syntax, and layered meanings. Much of Montgomery’s humor, Haire-Sergeant points out, operates through the formal manipulation of Anne’s speeches and others’ responses, activating ironic, satirical, and subversive meanings (156). Anne’s conflicts with adults usually undermine their set of values and prioritize hers. Finally, the text reflects Anne’s subjectivity, both through the descriptions of nature and the use of Anne’s long speeches.

The next chapter will analyze Frances Hodgson Burnett’s voice, symbolism, and use of natural description. Burnett endows nature with power in The Secret Garden and cultivates realism with romanticism in her story of the regeneration of neglected children and a dying house and garden. Her authorial voice resembles Alcott’s more than Montgomery’s in its direct, matter-of-fact narration of events. Unlike both Alcott and Montgomery, however, Burnett’s novel is heavily symbolic, her heroine’s mental development is the most immature, and her character is the least charming.

100

Chapter Four: The Secret Garden

Dear old gardens! The very breath of them is a benediction. L.M. Montgomery, in a journal entry dated Aug. 28, 1901

Shortly before The Secret Garden appeared as a novel in 1911, one journalist wondered:

“How many other women are capable of holding the public attention and interest for more than thirty years, and of earning, single-handed and by sheer power of brain, far over a hundred thousand dollars, as Mrs. Burnett has lately done, in less than two years?” (qtd. in Gerzina,

Unexpected 183-4). Although it is safe to regard this as a rhetorical question, the answer could readily be Louisa May Alcott and L.M. Montgomery, both of whom were famous and, if not wealthy, then certainly financially secure as a result of their success. As literary celebrities, however, neither quite rivaled Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose successful books and plays, numerous interviews and social engagements, two failed marriages, “eccentric” dress and affected manners proved irresistible material for salacious (and libelous) gossip columns and much, unkind, public speculation on her private life. Among the charges laid at her door include the holy trinity of female sins: sexual license, vanity, and bad motherhood. People accused her of

“[posing] her children on rugs when visitors call,” “[teaching] them to kiss her hand and call her

‘Dearest’ before people,” and “other and unpleasanter things” the author of one article did not care to repeat (“The Lounger” 229).

The attacks and fabrications of the press became so bad that they provoked responses from disinterested observers as well as Burnett herself, who published a lengthy and detailed rebuttal in The Critic in March of 1889:

What I am curious about in connection with all this is the mental attitude of the

writer. Did he say to himself, ‘Here is a woman who comes to New York and

attends entirely to her own affairs, sees no one, goes nowhere, does nothing, says 101

nothing, wears nothing worthy of the slightest notice—no use at all from a

newspaper point of view. What shall I do with her? She is neither mad, nor bad—

only uninteresting. Happy thought! I will write an article which will suggest, that

she is all three!’ Did he say this, and was the letter the outcome, and is it quite

indifferent to reputable, truth-loving people that he should be at liberty to do it?

(233)

Certainly what Burnett must have thought, even if she did not print it, was that such slander must have been motivated in part by her violation of gender norms. Her conspicuous professional success and financial independence as a woman undoubtedly influenced her detractors. She had out-earned, supported, and divorced two husbands, one who was ten years her junior. In addition to the royalties she regularly received for her novels, her plays netted approximately $1000 to

$2000 a week (Gerzina, “End” 183). Her success was not discreet; she spent the money she earned on travel and houses. She crossed the Atlantic thirty-three times and maintained residences in England, America, and Bermuda. She traveled over the Continent, spending significant amounts of time in Kent, Paris, and Mediterranean resort areas, and in the United

States she traveled between all the major cities, spending most of her time in Washington, D.C. and New York. When she finally retired to the United States, she built her estate on Long Island, where she conducted interviews in which she candidly expressed her opinion on subjects considered radical, like New Thought and Christian Science. She considered several different

English names for her home, which no doubt contributed to the perception of her as pretentious or affectedly sentimental. She was a self-proclaimed “Romantick Lady,” and her son Vivian

(widely believed to be the model for Lord Fauntleroy, dressed in black velvet and lace as a child) published a biography of her by that name after her death. 102

Burnett’s literary celebrity had been assured since the serial publication of Little Lord

Fauntleroy in 1885, but from the time she was eighteen and submitted her first story to a magazine, she was never rejected by any publisher. Neither Alcott nor Montgomery was so fortunate, but Burnett’s origins, while “genteel,” did not augur a literary career. 42 She was born in Manchester, England, on November 24, 1849, and her family prospered until her father died when she was four years old. 43 Her mother was compelled to sell their failing business in furnishings, and they moved from neighborhood to neighborhood until Frances was fifteen and they migrated to America at the encouragement of her mother’s brother. They arrived in New

Market, Tennessee, in the final month of the Civil War, and when their uncle’s promises of opportunity and security failed to materialize, the family of six almost starved, too proud to accept the charity of the few neighbors there were and unable to find enough work to sustain themselves. Resourceful Frances started a school for the few children of the town and accepted food as payment; she also received odd sewing jobs and eventually supplemented the family income with her writing. 44 When she was twenty-three, she married her New Market neighbor,

Swan Burnett. They had two children, but after the first three years of marriage, they spent a great deal of time apart as Frances traveled to produce her plays and Dr. Burnett tried to maintain

42 Alcott, Montgomery, and Burnett were the children of unequal marriages in which the mother married beneath her family’s social station. The disparity is most pronounced for Alcott, whose father’s family was barely literate and whose mother’s descended from John Hancock, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Montgomery’s mother came from “old Island stock,” the Scottish Presbyterian settlers’ aristocracy, which emphasized the importance of literary and religious education, even for women.

43 All three authors were born at the end of November. Alcott was born on November 29, 1832. She died on March 6, 1888, two days after her father. She was the youngest of the three women, at 54. Montgomery was born on November 30 th , 1874, and died on April 24, 1942. Burnett died of colon cancer on October 29, 1924. She was almost 75, the oldest of the three.

44 Burnett’s early experiences of hunger influenced her persistent and descriptive references to wholesome food within her novels. Alcott too almost starved with her family at Fruitlands, but while she and Montgomery describe the purchase, preparation, and consumption of meals, food is a less central motif. Since The Secret Garden presents a health regime for children, it is natural that food should play such a primary role. Alcott and Burnett were authors of true necessity; however much they might have considered authorship an essential part of their nature, they were motivated by the indelible experience of hunger. 103 a successful eye-and-ear practice in Washington. The success of Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1885 coincided with the end of their marriage, and five years later her sixteen-year-old son Lionel died of tuberculosis. 45

Burnett’s oeuvre of thirteen plays and more than fifty novels include the popular adult titles A Lady of Quality , That Lass o’ Lowries , Haworth’s , and Through One Administration , as well as the children’s classics Little Lord Fauntleroy , A Little Princess , and The Secret Garden .

During her lifetime Burnett could cross the emerging line between adult and children’s literature indiscriminately, and it was not until after her death that she came to be associated with children’s literature only. Strangely, however, it is not her most famous work Little Lord

Fauntleroy for which she is remembered (and memorialized. The fountain sculpture in Central

Park commissioned after her death features Mary, Dickon, and Colin, rather than the more famous Cedric Errol, a curious, but prescient choice of the 1924 planners.) The Secret Garden was positively, appreciatively, and quietly reviewed; no one anticipated its future stature as a children’s classic. Anne Lundin, in her article “The Critical and Commercial Reception of The

Secret Garden , 1911-2004,” explains that The Secret Garden ’s critical currency appreciated with the acceptance of children’s literature as a field of literary criticism and attributes Burnett’s ascension to classic status to the work of her first biographer, Ann Thwaite, and to the criticism of Phyllis Bixler, who began publishing articles on Burnett in 1978. Her canonical status predates these efforts, however, because, as Lundin points out, The Secret Garden had been loved and passed down since its initial publication. Two years after Burnett’s death and fourteen years since The Secret Garden ’s serial publication, readers ranked the book in twelfth place in a survey of favorite books from The Youth’s Companion (Lundin 283).

45 Montgomery also lost a child, her infant son Hugh Montgomery. 104

Even before children’s literature became a field of serious study, at least one modern critic appreciated its literary value. In 1950, Marghanita Laski published Mrs. Ewing, Mrs.

Molesworth, and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett in which, according to Lundin, she “astutely perceived the metaphorical significance of an introspective, unhappy child figure learning how to cope by cultivating a garden,” in a narrative that was “empathetic” and “comforting” (285). Laski writes,

“I do not know of any children’s book other than The Secret Garden that frankly poses this problem of the introspective unlikeable child in terms that children can understand and then offers an acceptable solution” (qtd. in Clark, Kiddie 31). Laski’s observation subtly addresses one of the fundamental difficulties of writing for children. A critic contemporary with Burnett, in his acclamatory review of The Secret Garden , observed that while many authors wrote

“delightful” books for children and a few wrote “entertaining books about children” for adults, only the exceptional author could “write a book about children with sufficient skill, charm, simplicity, and significance to make it acceptable to both young and old” ( New York Times 265).

Many readers at the time of The Secret Garden ’s publication could sense its dual attraction and its ability to convey to adults and children simultaneously the problem of Mary’s unlovable qualities without being didactic, sentimental, or simplistic. By 1950, however, it would appear that her status as a cross-over artist was contested; in response to Laski’s study, a critic for the Saturday Review argued: “the test of worth for children’s books—Alice and Huck pass such a test—is whether they can be reread by adults” (qtd. in Lundin 285). Again the bias for child characters created by men asserts itself. Mary, the critic judged, was interesting exclusively to children. She was not, as Laski thought, complexly figured to appeal to both the children who could participate in the mysteries of the manor and the secret of the garden and the 105 grown-ups who could identify with her contrariness and understand it as the consequence of adult neglect.

Most contemporary magazine and newspaper critics were not thinking of canon formation, however, and their reviews focused almost exclusively on summarizing the plot and were as likely as not to consider the garden the main protagonist of the story, rather than Mary,

Colin, or Dickon, two noticeable departures from the type of reception Little Women and Anne received. Alcott published the vast majority of her writing serially, Montgomery also published with many magazines and journals, but neither one published their masterpieces serially even though their novels manifest their training as episodic storytellers. (Only portions of Little

Women and Anne of Green Gables had been published separately, before the novels were written, as different stories.) Burnett, on the other hand, frequently published her stories serially and transformed them into plays or novels and vice-versa even though her style was not episodic. 46 The Secret Garden , always intended as a children’s novel, was nonetheless published as a serial in American Magazine (an adult publication) in 1910 and released in novel-form in

1911.

Her friend called it a sort of “childrens Jane Eyre” and she herself described it as “an innocent thriller of a story to which grown ups listen spell bound” (qtd. in Gerzina, “End” 181).

Was it a serial or a novel? An adult’s book adapted for children or a children’s book adapted for adults? This seemingly amorphous conception nevertheless adhered to a plotline rather than to a sequence of self-contained, chronological episodes. Consequently, the novel was friendlier to reviewers who wanted to provide a summary for their readers (and who were unconcerned about

Mary’s disappearance from the latter half of the book, presumably because Colin’s usurpation

46 Perhaps the most versatile of the three, or at least the one most attuned to the profit-making potential of adaptive work, she published her most famous children’s works serially, or, in the case of A Little Princess , as a play. In this way she profited from each medium for the same material. 106 seemed only natural), but it has presented recent critics with the problem of reconciling Colin’s colonization of the garden with Mary’s previously demonstrated assertiveness. This issue will be developed at greater length in a later section; for now it is important to note that The Secret

Garden marks a shift away from the episodic structure mastered by Alcott and Montgomery.

The second difference, related to the first, is that the identification of the ‘main’ protagonist became a matter for debate. Colin, Mary, Dickon, Mrs. Sowerby, Misselthwaite

Manor, the robin, and the garden were all variously proposed and entertained by critics, contemporary and modern. With Anne of Green Gables and Little Women , there was no question whose story was of primary importance; the autobiographical connection between the authors and heroines, if nothing else, assured that the emotional intensity and psychological verisimilitude would be invested with Jo and Anne. The titles illuminate the distinctions between who or what the three books were about: Little Women refers to the four March sisters with an emphasis on maturation and female community; Anne of Green Gables identifies the heroine and her quest for belonging, appropriately giving character and place equal billing; and The Secret

Garden , a title which replaced the manuscript heading, “Mistress Mary,” directs attention to the garden, evoking its central agency and mythic power within the story. Here, as with Anne , place takes on an active role and thematic significance, but in The Secret Garden ’s case, it rivals the heroine in narrative agency, causing critics to wonder who the primary “character” really was.

The following section seeks to establish Burnett’s characterization within the context of her antecedents.

Jo, Anne, and Mary: Kindred Spirits?

At first glance, these three heroines seem to have little in common. Jo, the eldest of the three at fifteen, rejects her femininity and struggles to realize her identity and professional 107 aspirations within the confinement of domestic duty and poverty. Anne, the precocious eleven- year-old orphan, wants to be loved. She is talkative, sensitive, imaginative, and eager to please; everything, in other words, that sour, taciturn, spoiled, contrary ten-year-old Mary is not. Indeed, one would expect them to be more similar, because they are both lonely children whose responsiveness to nature is closely allied to their quest for a home. Anne’s history is actually much darker than Mary’s. Her capacity for love and relative lack of emotional scarring seem remarkable when one considers she was orphaned at three months and left in the successive care of alcoholic and impoverished foster parents who demonstrated no interest in her except as a domestic servant. Nevertheless, it is Mary, the spoiled, neglected child, who exhibits the effects of an abused childhood.

It is tempting to view this as a natural progression in the literary portrayal of children.

Between 1868 and 1910, the girl heroine had become younger biologically and mentally and had more latitude to deviate from the archetype. 47 If, as Lurie argues, Alcott radically broke with the tradition of presenting “modest, dutiful, and obedient” children, then Mary Lennox exemplifies this development carried to its extreme (18). Jo marked the departure from the model of “pious, industrious and well-mannered” children and the beginning of the fictional child who was

“imaginative, inventive, self-reliant and constantly in trouble” (Peter Keating, qtd. in Foster and

Simons 181). Anne, the next major female character, becomes a transition figure in the “evolving trend” of flawed, fictional children (Foster and Simons 181). Anne adapted the model of a

47 Not only did the heroine become younger, but the span of time covered by each novel decreased. The first volume of Little Women records only a year in the March family, but by the end of the second volume, Jo is twenty-five, and in the final chapter, “Harvest Time,” which serves as a sort of epilogue, Jo ages six or seven years to be thirty-one or thirty-two. Anne is only eleven at the beginning of her novel and fifteen at the end (Jo’s age at the beginning of Little Women ). Mary’s story is the briefest of them all (and produced no sequels), covering only three seasons, from winter through summer. The book ends at the beginning of autumn. The choice of time frame shows the shift in interest from the literal maturation of the characters to the resolution of their problems. Surprisingly, however, Mary is the protagonist who changes the most in the course of her story. Critics of both Anne and Jo lament their maturation, regarding it as a diminishment of their individuality as they conform to social expectations, but compared to Mary, they hardly change at all. In fact, of the three, Mary desperately needs socialization. 108 flawed character, but made her mistakes work for her, endearing her to the reader and becoming some of her most “winning” qualities (Avery, “Remarkable and Winning”). Unlike Jo’s battle against her “bosom enemy,” Anne’s flaws (occasional thoughtlessness and bursts of temper) contribute to the humor of the novel, rather than to its gravity.

Kensinger describes this new type of child-heroine who “on initial appearance onlookers saw [as] lonely, sallow or sickly, freckled, plain at first glance in outgrown or handed-down garb of dreadful taste.” She remarks that “they expected her to be meek, mild, humble, grateful for…moral instruction. And she was not.” The heroine was “painfully honest” with an “unruly tongue,” and “displayed dangerous streaks of imagination, originality and perception”

(Kensinger 80). Anne, as the orphan waif with an immense imagination and a non-stop tongue, epitomized this new archetype of the fictional, orphan child; her initial appearance in her tight wincey dress, which drew attention to her skinniness, her red hair and freckles, gave way to an astute viewer’s perception of her lovely, large, soulful eyes and delicate features, a heroine all

“’spirit and fire and dew,’” with a personality to match (Browning qtd. in Montgomery, Anne

145).

Kensinger’s description of the orphan type is important to note here because Mary appears as a direct response to this archetype and the characterization of a child like Anne. Mary too enters the novel as a plain, sallow, skinny orphan in cheap clothing. A reader might rightly expect her to demonstrate some inner quality which redeems such an unpromising appearance, but she does not. Instead, Burnett makes it clear that Mary’s personality is as unattractive as her body. But Mary’s intransigence and disagreeableness constitute a major part of her appeal;

Burnett returns to Alcott’s serious consideration of personal flaws, but as with Montgomery, such flaws begin to work in favor of her heroine. Readers respond to Mary’s assertiveness, her 109 determination and courage, and the contrariness that prompts her to defy others and to tell Colin,

“If they wished I would [die], I wouldn’t” (86).

Alcott’s characterization of Jo March deconstructed the image of the well-behaved, feminine child; Montgomery used the license this gave her to create a heroine who challenged and subverted adult authority; and Burnett in turn deconstructed the “Romantic archetype of femininity and childishness” Montgomery left in her wake. She abandoned Jo March’s

“dynamism” and Anne Shirley’s charm and squarely presented an unlikeable child whose very disagreeableness is the source of her power (Foster and Simons 179). Her negative traits are not innate characteristics which must be repressed or eliminated, as with Jo March, nor are they minor character flaws which serve to enhance her appeal and naturally disappear as she matures, as with Anne. Her sour, sullen, withdrawn nature is a direct result of her neglect and indulgence as a child. Without external discipline or the intense self-examination present in Little Women ,

Mary learns not to be a selfish child, and with the restorative power of friendship, health, and nature, she becomes a happier one. Mary possesses the spirit, independence, creativity, and vulnerability which made Anne and Jo so appealing, but her characterization emphasizes personal failings that are truly flaws as well as a younger stage of mental development.

Nature, the Pastoral, and Magic

If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d go out into a great big field all alone or into the deep, deep woods, and I’d look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I’d just feel a prayer. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Nature, which is virtually absent from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women , is central to both Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden . While critics of both novels have identified nature as an active presence in each book, it is Burnett’s book which endows nature with religious power. As the nineteenth century progressed and the Edwardian period began, nature 110 increasingly replaced religion in children’s literature. 48 Montgomery and Burnett, who wrote

Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden within five years of each other, exhibit cultural, rather than chronological differences. Lurie notes that North American authors were more likely to envision nature as “transcendentally wonderful” rather than magical, which was generally a

British trope (177). Both authors, however, belong to the tradition of pastoral literature, of which

Anne of Green Gables is a paradigmatic example. Northrop Frye writes:

The pastoral myth in its most common form is associated with childhood, or with

some earlier social condition—pioneer life, the small town, the habitant rooted to

his land—that can be identified with childhood. The nostalgia for a world of

peace and protection, with a spontaneous response to the nature around it, with a

leisure and composure not to be found today, is particularly strong in Canada. It is

overpowering in our popular literature, from Anne of Green Gables to Leacock’s

Mariposa. (343)

Phyllis Bixler lists several prominent titles in children’s literature which belong to the pastoral tradition, including: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Tom Sawyer (1876); Heidi

(1880); Peter Pan (1904); The Secret Garden (1911); Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series (1932-1943);

The Wind in the Willows (1908); Winnie-the-Pooh (1926, 1928); The Hobbit (1938); and

Charlotte’s Web (1952) (“Idealization” 86).

48 As can be seen in the epigraph to this chapter, Montgomery was moving toward an identification of the divine in nature, but her colorful sunsets and bucolic scenes inspire spirituality rather than worship. Instead of religious meaning, Montgomery’s landscapes offer a powerful validation of self. We see Anne, not God, reflected in nature. As Rosemary Ross Johnston argues in “Interior/Exterior Landscapes,” Montgomery’s descriptions of nature frame the subjectivity of the novel; there is “a looking outwards that constitutes a deep looking inwards” (412). In a complementary argument, Foster and Simons write that Anne’s “selfhood develops from outside the narrow parameters of religious orthodoxy,” and regard this as the first step towards the pantheism of The Secret Garden in which “…nature is divine, and full of power to inspire and heal” (Foster and Simons 158; Lurie 177). Lurie continues, “But while for some nature must be sought in the enchanted forest, for others the magical location is a garden. In their books, to go into a garden is often the equivalent of attending a Sunday service, and gardening itself may become a kind of religious act” (177). Among the more explicit examples, Burnett compares the garden to a temple at least twice and compares the children’s rituals to religious service (140; 172). 111

Bixler and Christine Wilkie contend that this Romantic identification of the child and nature has its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and William Wordsworth’s Prelude , and

Wilkie points out that the dominant image of nature was of a “beneficent, recuperative, Edenic, and pleasurable” setting (318). She writes:

Alice had her adventures in a surrealized Oxford College Garden, Mole found his

sybaritic meaning of life on the well-managed banks of the upper Thames, and

Peter Rabbit was traumatized in a well-managed cottage garden. The Wild could

be tamed and reproduced in gardens that were fashionably natural. (318)

A garden seemed the natural expression of nature’s nurturing power. The close associations between childhood and nature made gardens, cultivated rural areas, or ordered space the natural choice of setting for a children’s story. Bixler cites Michael Cohen’s survey of the garden in

Victorian literature, where he points to the numerous paintings depicting children in gardens from the 1770s through the 1850s, to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the image of the symbiotic relationship between childhood and nature in bourgeoisie culture (“Gardens” 289).

Bixler finally argues that the pastoral tradition evident in Burnett’s work belongs to the “georgic ideal” of man’s relationship with nature, as opposed to the “bucolic ideal” of Tom Sawyer or

Huck Finn . She explains that the georgic ideal, based on the farmer’s life, emphasized the working relationship between nature and man, rather than the unreciprocated relationship typified by the shepherd’s enjoyment of and pleasure in nature. Bixler writes: “Within the social institutions of family and community, man works to help nature yield its bounty. Man’s work and social life are determined by the seasonal cycle, and this yearly experience of nature’s death and rebirth is often paralleled by an individual or social experience of renewal or rebirth”

(“Idealization” 86). T.D. MacLulich and Mary Henley Rubio (and others who have compared 112

Anne with Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn ) would classify Anne as a pastoral myth exemplifying the georgic ideal with its emphasis on transformation and growth parallel with nature. 49 Such a comparison generally contains implicit criticism of Twain’s story. MacLulich writes:

One particularly striking similarity between the two books is the protagonist’s

fondness for playacting and self-dramatization. Tom’s imaginative life is shaped

by his reading of lurid adventure stories. Anne, for her part, is infatuated with

sentimental ladies’ fiction. … Montgomery’s story, in which Anne eventually

puts aside her personal ambitions in order to take care of the failing Marilla,

differs significantly from the fantasy of irresponsible adventures and unearned

rewards that Twain creates. (386)

Nevertheless, critics consistently describe Anne’s story as an idealized portrayal of childhood written for nostalgic women.

Burnett’s version of the georgic ideal pastoral is firmly rooted in realism through detail and the verisimilitude of a neglected child’s psyche. A reviewer for the New York Times wrote:

Readers…will find in it such thorough understanding of the heart of childhood,

such loving pleasure in the beauty of the out-of-doors and such conviction of its

power to heal the human spirit, whether old or young, such skill in the

management of simple materials and such charm of style that they will care for it

a great deal. (“What Was Hid” 267)

And they did. Burnett wrote in a letter, “You cannot think how everyone loves that story. People write to me with a sort of passion of it” (182).

49 Rubio, comparing Anne with Huck Finn, avoids passing judgment while making the case for equal respect. “The main difference was that Huck, a boy, could challenge conventions, but Anne, a girl, had to conform to them. Otherwise, there were many interesting similarities between the two books. Each author had a wonderfully comic way with satire, and each book—though telling a simple, episodic story—had a great deal of depth” (Rubio, Gift 4).

113

Symbolic Nature

One reason it is necessary to distinguish between Montgomery’s depiction of nature and

Burnett’s is the latter’s use of symbolic imagery. The metaphorical layers of The Secret Garden deviate significantly from the literary practice of Alcott or Montgomery, who were firmly ensconced in the realm of the literal, despite their irony, Montgomery’s poeticism, and Alcott’s occasional simile. Bixler observes that critics primarily focus on two aspects of The Secret

Garden ’s appeal, its “psychological realism in its portrayal of ill-tempered children, and…its use of pastoral imagery to symbolize the children’s physical and psychological healing” (“Gardens”

287-88). Burnett’s decision to parallel the children’s healing with the renewal of the garden combines her realistic depiction of their consciousness with the restorative power of the garden, making the story function on a metaphorical and a literal plane. Foster and Simons provide an exceptional summary of how this dual realism and metaphor function:

Whilst the garden itself creates a magical new world…, the fantasy is given

validity by the textual reliance on the scrupulously imitative method of classic

realist fiction. The details of house and garden, the food that Mary eats, the bulb

that she plants, the visual and tactile recreation of the landscape: all serve to

reinforce the solidity of the world that she inhabits. This surface realism (together

with the often deliberately deflationary narrative voice which undercuts any

sentimentalization of childhood) fails, however, to diminish the power of the

fantasy which remains the core of the story. It is the social realism, the legacy of

Victorian fiction, that carries the weight of moral conviction of the text, but it is

the fairy-tale plot and romance motifs which establish its mythic dimension…

(176) 114

Elizabeth Waterston writes that Montgomery uses “realistic detail to facilitate…gentle entry into an imagined experience,” and with Burnett, this effect is even more pronounced (“To the World”

414). The garden, permeated by the female nurturing power of nature, called “Magic” by the children or the “Big Good Thing” by Mrs. Sowerby, possesses the ability to awaken the dormant life inside the children as well as inside the roses. The reader is led to accept this belief not through any description of extraordinary or supernatural features, but through a realistic, mimetic description of the setting and its effect on the children’s psyche. The mutual awakening of the children and the garden is made credible through Burnett’s comparisons of the children with nature and the parallel experience of their growth.

Mary, who begins the novel as a lonely, isolated figure, must learn to identify and empathize with others. She first begins to connect with her environment when she meets the robin. His chirping “actually gave Mary a queer feeling in her heart, because he was so pretty and cheerful and seemed so like a person” (24). The robin initiates her emotional awakening; from him she learns that she is lonely. “She had not known before that this was one of the things which made her feel sour and cross. She seemed to find it out when the robin looked at her and she looked at the robin” (25). Ben Weatherstaff tells her “Tha’rt like th’ robin” (54), and Mary herself establishes her connection to the garden and finds her place in it through her identification with the robin. She protests, “Nothing belongs to me. I found it myself and I got into it myself. I was only just like the robin, and they wouldn’t take it from the robin” (60).

Dickon too recognizes Mary’s intimate connection with the garden and her place within it. He says to her, “’If tha’ was a missel thrush an’ showed me where thy nest was, does tha’ think I’d tell any one? Not me,’ he said. ‘Tha’ art as safe as a missel thrush’” (66). 50

50 Critics usually point out, when they cite this line, that the name of the estate is Misselthwaite Manor. 115

Mary is also compared to the garden itself. The garden has been neglected and shut up for ten years, just as Mary has been neglected and emotionally dead for ten years. [“Nobody wants it, nobody cares for it,” she says (60), and Mrs. Sowerby says, “Them as is not wanted scarce ever thrives” (95).] She anxiously asks Ben Weatherstaff how to tell if the roses are “not quite dead” when “they have no leaves and look gray and brown and dry,” and he tells her he must wait for the sun to shine on them and the rain to fall on them to be able to tell (56). The roses are not dead, and nor is plain Mary, who becomes as pretty as a “blush rose” with healthy exercise, wholesome diet, and her work in the garden (160).

Colin’s transformation is even more dramatic than Mary’s, with a significant physical component in addition to his emotional growth. The first time Colin visits the garden in the spring time, he announces he is going to live forever and learns to stand, and then to walk. He too is incorporated into the natural life of the garden. The nesting robins watch him take his first steps, and the father robin explains to his concerned wife that human boys are just like Eggs, which are learning to fly for the first time (152). The robin is the only creature Burnett personifies in the book, but she regularly reminds the reader that all creatures belong to one great, omnipresent power and that each creature is endowed with “Soul” (Burnett, “My Robin”

201). In The Secret Garden , humans and animals can intuitively understand one another, regardless of language. Mary’s ability to communicate with both Dickon and the robin in their own language signals both her kinship with the natural world and her emotional growth.

In an interview with the Washington Post , Burnett confessed her belief in “a constant mental communication between minds” that resembles Montgomery’s conception of “kindred spirits” (“Social Sets” 254). Mary tells Colin that, “’Dickon says anything will understand if you’re friends with it for sure, but you have to be friends for sure,’” and Ben Weatherstaff, 116 another friend of the robin, says to Mary, “We was wove out of th’ same cloth,” a reflection

Mary repeats and extends to include Colin, her male equivalent in distemper and selfishness

(109; 25). 51 Colin, like Mary, intuitively responds to Dickon, the human embodiment of the natural power which pervades the garden. 52 The children frequently refer to Dickon, consciously depicted as a Pan figure, as an “animal charmer,” and Colin recognizes himself as an animal susceptible to Dickon’s power. He is omnipresent, just like the “Magic,” and his words have the power to make things grow. As Mrs. Sowerby says, “he just whispers things out o’ th’ ground”

(49). Mary describes him as an angel; the robin perceives him as a larger robin with different feathers; and Dickon himself sometimes believes that he is animal rather than boy. Such heavy symbolism would not have found its way into the work of either Alcott or Montgomery; nor would either of them have regarded animals as comparable to humans and possessed of the capacity to communicate with them.

Realistic Nature

Despite Dickon’s godlike powers and Susan Sowerby’s evocation of the Virgin Mary, the garden assumes a natural appearance. In one characteristic description, Mary tries to explain what spring looks like. She says:

“Things are crowding up out of the earth…. And there are flowers uncurling and

buds on everything and the green veil has covered nearly all the gray and the birds

are in such a hurry about their nests for fear they may be too late that some of

51 Burnett frequently invokes the psychological fit between Mary and Colin (most memorably, during the scene in which Mary loses her temper because Colin has). Susan Sowerby says that their relationship will be “’th’ makin’ o’ her an’ th’ savin’ o’ him,”’ just as Margaret Atwood remarks that the beauty of Anne and Marilla’s relationship is the “tightness of their psychological fit.” In her words, “each one saves the other” (Burnett 144; Atwood 226).

52 Another example in which non-verbal communication supercedes language is when the children sing the Doxology in the garden. Dickon teaches it to them, and they instinctively understand its spiritual meaning even when they do not know the meaning of the words. Mrs. Sowerby (who enters in a blue cloak) tells them that the words themselves do not matter; it is the spirit in which they are offered (161). 117

them are even fighting for places in the secret garden. And the rosebushes look as

wick as wick can be, and there are primroses in the lanes and woods, and the

seeds we planted are up, and Dickon has brought the fox and the crow and the

squirrels and a new-born lamb.” (115)

Mary provides a literal rendering of what is happening in the garden. She lists more than she describes, as is appropriate to a ten-year-old’s conversation, and her catalogue of plants and animals inhabiting the secret garden is not extraordinary in any way. She describes the ordinary natural phenomena of birds nesting and plants beginning to bloom. Such a description, although uttered by an excited child susceptible to such things as “green veils” and the allure of

“primroses in lanes and woods,” contrasts with the poetic and colorful descriptions of nature in

Anne of Green Gables . The descriptions in Anne rely primarily on color and poetic language to evoke the sensation of beauty and spiritual transcendence. The emotional quality of the descriptions and the particularity of their expression classify these visions as unique to the character/narrator who perceives them. The reader is enjoined to see the world through their eyes, rather than as an ordinary viewer might see it. Anne’s descriptions are unique to her even though they are not meant to depict the actual, identifiable attributes of specific locations.

The descriptions in The Secret Garden do not attempt to delineate the specific qualities of any particular landscape either, but Burnett is much less reliant on color and poetic language.

Her descriptions are not intended as the natural reflections of internal states of mind unique to the perceiver. 53 Mary’s, Dickon’s, or Martha’s descriptions of what happens on the moor or in the gardens are not unique to them; anyone may see the world this way. Burnett’s descriptions do not invite the reader to feel emotion the way Montgomery’s do; instead they invite the reader to

53 The dominant stylistic feature of her prose is repetitive use of the word “and,” used for emphasis or to mirror child speech (which conveys sympathy with Mary’s perspective). 118 look and to feel general things, like the smell of heather and honey, the physical sensation caused by the wind and sun, or the taste of fresh air. Her nature descriptions evoke joy and possibility;

Anne’s are often dreamy representations of her internal mind, suggesting beauty and spiritual transcendence. In fact, the only description approximating Anne’s style is the most colorful and poetic description in all of The Secret Garden , and it is the final one, appearing on the second-to- last page of the book.

The place was a wilderness of autumn gold and purple and violet blue and

flaming scarlet and on every side were sheaves of late lilies standing together—

lilies which were white or white and ruby…. Late roses climbed and hung and

clustered and the sunshine deepening the hue of the yellowing trees made one feel

that one stood in an embowered temple of gold. (172)

There is a wholeness and directness to this final description that was lacking in Mary’s excited explanations and the partial revelations of the awakening garden. The scene depicts Lord

Craven’s reunion with his son, the symbolic culmination of the healing process and the garden’s visual climax. In this scene, the relative lavishness of the description encourages the reader to see the garden and the characters fully renewed.

Voice

Any attempt to describe character or narrative voice in The Secret Garden usually begins with the first sentence: “When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too”

(3). Burnett asserts her omniscient, authorial presence and frames the narrative as a story, adopting a straightforward, simple, and definite style of address. Foster and Simons hear in this sentence the “deliberately deflationary” voice that deconstructs past models of femininity and 119 childishness, and Margaret Mackey hears the “serviceable and lively storytelling voice” that

“briskly recounts the events which befall Mary” (374). Burnett’s narrative style faintly echoes

Alcott’s lively, direct, sometimes didactic prose, and her willingness to enter into a younger perspective recalls Montgomery’s use of Anne’s speeches and indirect discourse to tell her story.

The engaging simplicity of the first sentence invites a child to listen to a story. 54 Burnett maintains the simple diction and syntax of her story, often distilling events as though through the consciousness of a child. This style contributes to the psychological realism of the novel and, as

Laski noted, “poses this problem of the introspective unlikeable child in terms that children can understand and then offers an acceptable solution.” Alternatively described: “children are quite as capable of entering into the adult view of themselves as adults are of re-entering childhood, if the fiction enables them to do so” (Aidan Chambers qtd. in Clark, Kiddie 96). Burnett’s prose encourages this simultaneous perspective.

For instance, the adult reader is quite aware that the tantrum scene between Mary and

Colin is ironically funny, but a child reader must come to this conclusion with the aid of explication. Burnett writes:

It was not until afterward that Mary realized that the thing had been funny as well

as dreadful—that it was funny that all the grown-up people were so frightened

that they came to a little girl just because they guessed she was almost as bad as

Colin himself. (102)

Later in the narrative, when Colin meets Ben Weatherstaff, Burnett describes his manner as “a queer mixture of crabbed tenderness and shrewd understanding,” in language that probably appeals to adults rather than children (132). Even if children do not understand the words,

54 The 148-word long sentence of Montgomery’s novel opens abstractly, rather than simply or conversationally, while Alcott’s tableau-like open is both simple and presented as a conscious story. Both Burnett and Alcott’s openings are “visual” in a way that Montgomery’s description is not (even though it describes a brook). 120 however, they still grasp their meaning through textual details, like Ben’s gruffness toward

Mary, his tears when he sees Colin, and his affection for his mother.

Occasionally Burnett will adopt childlike language, images, and syntax to emulate their consciousness. Foster and Simons write:

The early scenes of the book project a powerful image of disorientation as filtered

through Mary’s consciousness. Her situation in the plague-ridden house appears

as a fragmentary, almost dream-like sequence of isolated images and overheard

scraps of conversation, only half-comprehensible to the child’s imperfect grasp of

events. (179)

They refer to Burnett’s narration of the cholera epidemic: “[Mary] only knew that people were ill and that she heard mysterious and frightening sounds. … The house was perfectly still. She had never known it to be so silent before. She heard neither voices nor footstep, and wondered if everybody had got well of the cholera and all the trouble was over” (Burnett 5). The final clause,

“if everybody had got well of the cholera and all the trouble was over,” appears to be a literal transcription of Mary’s own thoughts; the previous sentences are similarly related from her perspective, recounting nothing but what Mary knows, senses, and feels in language she could produce herself. On another occasion, when Mary is kept awake by the mournful noise of a storm, Burnett writes, “Mary did not know what ‘wutherin’’ meant until she listened, and then she understood. It must mean that hollow shuddering sort of roar which rushed round and round the house as if the giant no one could see were buffeting it and beating at the walls and windows to try to break in” (30). The authorial voice of the first sentence is replaced by Mary’s consciousness in the second as she works out the meaning of “wutherin’” on her own, imagining it as a giant assaulting the house, an image suited to a child’s nighttime anxieties. 121

Burnett will often unite the adult’s and child’s perspective by combining their perceptions through blending her own voice with Mary’s, as in the previous example, or by providing multiple ways to access her meaning, as with the description of Ben Weatherstaff. To establish sympathy with Mary, Burnett uses both these approaches. For example, she frequently refers to

Mary’s smallness and isolation in order to emphasize her loneliness and the hostility of her environment. When Mary first arrives at Misselthwaite Manor, Burnett writes, “As she stood on the stone floor she looked a very small, odd little black figure, and she felt as small and lost and odd as she looked” (15). This straightforward appeal to the reader’s sympathy provides a foundation for a later, more elaborate figuring of Mary’s emotions. As she wanders the grounds, she finds only two other living creatures, Ben Weatherstaff and the robin. The robin is the first creature to demonstrate any interest in her.

She stopped and listened to him and somehow his cheerful, friendly little whistle

gave her a pleased feeling—even a disagreeable little girl may be lonely, and the

big closed house and big bare moor and big bare gardens had made this one feel

as if there was no one left in the world but herself. (23)

The narrator describes the literal action of the scene, interpolates her own impression of events—

“even a disagreeable little girl may be lonely”—and suggests the consciousness of the child through her repeated use of the adjective “big.”

Conclusion

Anne Lundin, citing the work of children’s librarian Elizabeth Nesbitt, describes The

Secret Garden as a “’combination of the old and the new,’” a mix of “Romance and Actuality”

(284). Burnett’s description of the details of everyday life, her portrayal of Mary’s psyche, the credibility and colloquialism of the dialogue, and the depiction of the setting reinforce the 122 tangibility and immediacy of her fictional world. She combines this realism, made more insistent by the matter-of-fact, direct voice of the narrator, with the romantic associations of stormy moors, desolate manors, hidden invalids, and inconsolable, wandering lovers. Burnett imbues characters and environment with symbolic significance in order to parallel the children’s emotional awakening with the garden’s restoration. She gives nature the power to heal emotional and psychological wounds without resorting to the extraordinary or supernatural. These elements of the real and the romantic interact to simultaneously convey a sense of the ordinary and a sense of wonder.

The intersection of the romantic and the realistic can also be seen as a combination of

Little Women and Anne of Green Gables . Simply and generally stated, Burnett seems to write with Alcott’s matter-of-fact voice and see with Montgomery’s nature-loving eyes. Her narrative voice is omniscient, direct, sympathetic, and authoritative, but, unlike Alcott, Burnett employs symbolism and metaphor to shape the meaning of her text. Like Montgomery, Burnett associates children, psychological well-being, and the natural world. She adds a symbolic dimension missing from Anne of Green Gables , however, and presents a belief in the divine power of nature. Finally, Burnett’s character Mary Lennox partially derives from Jo March’s unorthodoxy and Anne Shirley’s vulnerability, and, like them, distinguishes herself in some way from her predecessors. Mary participates in the progressive deconstructions of conventional fictional femininity and childhood, shattering even the positive expectations of redeeming inner beauty.

Most notably, Burnett depicts the neglected child’s psyche with unsentimentalized accuracy. While both Alcott and Montgomery are praised for their “real understanding of children’s psychological makeup,” critics inevitably feel compelled to compare the relative strength of such understanding (MacLulich 388). Writing about Anne of Green Gables , T. D. 123

MacLulich compares Montgomery’s tone and characterization to Alcott’s, who, he argues

“ultimately judges human conduct by a standard that is moral rather than psychological” (388).

Writing about The Secret Garden , Foster and Simons in turn argue that “the moral emphases are subordinated to a more searching psychological dimension” than is present in either Anne of

Green Gables or Little Women (172). The process of individuation and moral leniency Alcott initiated culminates brilliantly in Burnett’s story of an anti-social, unremarkable child who finds companionship in a garden. The Secret Garden , by no means the last classic book to be written for girls, nevertheless seems like an appropriate bookend for the North American post-bellum period prior to World War I.

124

Afterword

Literary critics in this century have had little use for books that help readers to feel secure. Texts offering us more of what we already have and love are not nearly so good, we are told, as texts that challenge our expectations, dislodge us from the security of cherished beliefs, shatter our complacencies, split open the congealed surfaces of things, and propel us into new adventures of transgression and defamiliarization. Catherine Sheldrick Ross, “Readers Reading L.M. Montgomery”

Catherine Sheldrick Ross conducted interviews with mostly female readers who responded to questions regarding their personal reading habits and in which they placed Anne of

Green Gables “within a larger category of books that includes the rest of the Montgomery books,

Little Women , The Five Little Peppers , The Secret Garden , Heidi and Rebecca of Sunnybrook

Farm ” (423). Ross writes that these readers consistently returned to some of these books throughout their lifetimes, reporting that the stories gave them hope and made them feel secure.

This would have enormously gratified both Burnett and Montgomery who expressed the desire to increase their reader’s happiness. According to her son, Burnett announced on her deathbed,

“’With the best that was in me I have tried to write more happiness into the world’” (Burnett qtd. in Adams 314). Likewise, Montgomery confided to her journal, “’[I strive] to keep the shadows of my life out of my work. I would not wish to darken any other life—I want instead to be a messenger of optimism and sunshine’” (Montgomery qtd. in Fiamengo 228). As Ross points out, twentieth-century critics have not valued these efforts the way female readers do, and today the optimism and happiness of children’s novelists relegate them to a “sub-field” of literary criticism

(Lundin 285). Even the critical language used to describe these books—“pastoral,” “nostalgic,”

“ideal,” “romantic,” “regional”—connote limited appeal and images of innocence bordering on falsity.

The elements of realism in their books did not earn them acclaim with later critics either.

Margaret Atwood points out that “For Montgomery, ‘Avonlea’ was simply reality edited. She 125 was determined to write from what she knew: not the whole truth, perhaps, but not a total romanticization either” (224). Much the same (if not more) can be said for Alcott, who openly addressed the autobiographical content of her novel. Yet such fidelity to truth only earned her future dismissal as a mere “storyteller,” a “reporter” or “chronicler” of family history, rather than as an artist who with deliberate skill wrote a story which pleased millions of readers. If the initial reviews are to be credited as possessing any authority at all, then it is precisely these authors’ ability to tell a good story, and to tell it in a convincing, genuine way, that accounts for the cherished place they hold in the hearts of their readers.

Consider, for instance, this 1911 review in the New York Times , which described The

Secret Garden as a book for those “for whom literary craftsmanship is a source of enjoyment and a quiet, beautiful tale attractive” (“What Was Hid” 256-6). This writer’s sensitivity to the author’s craftsmanship recalls the complaints of readers and writers like Burnett, who, when they surveyed the early literature available to children, concluded: “Apparently it was believed that [a child] began life unbiased by even rudimentary perceptiveness and taste” (“Magic” 260). The way in which writers present their material matters just as much as what they have to say, whether they write for children or adults. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when “commentary [was] built into the very fabric of the story,” the narrative voice was a salient feature of every novel. For Little Women , Anne of Green Gables , and The Secret Garden , the narrative voice has maintained reader’s interest and affection for a hundred years or more

(Mackey 383).

In 1881, R. H. Stoddard claimed that Burnett’s characterization surpassed that of Dickens and claimed: “Her pathos, when she is pathetic, is so natural that I am not ashamed of the tears in my eyes; and her humor, when she is humorous, is so unforced that I do not despise myself for 126 laughing at it. I never question her domination over me when I am reading her books…” (223).

Burnett’s prose, Stoddard continues, conveys both “tenderness” and “strength,” and the reader

“never feel[s] that the story is not true to the nature it depicts; that it is not true to the imagination of the writer…” (223-4). Such praise is virtually indistinguishable from Alcott’s reception.

Critics admired her humor and pathos and wrote of the fluency and power of her style (and compared her to Dickens). Montgomery, of course, also earned recognition for her masterful combination of humor and pathos, and critics who wondered why stories of such little moment were so captivating invariably commented on the authenticity and strength of narration. Even in

The Secret Garden , which can boast a stronger plot than either Little Women or Anne of Green

Gables , readers identify the “steady, reliable pace of the storytelling” as its cohesive feature

(Mackey 374).

If we are to explain readers’ profound connections with these books and their enduring appeal, then we must consider each writer’s style, not just their characterization, themes, and plots. In my view, the narrative voice of each book is what sustains the individual’s interest from childhood to adulthood and from century to century. Phyllis Bixler, noting the challenges a text like The Secret Garden poses for feminists, writes: “…if one is to explain why The Secret

Garden continues to fascinate readers and elicit critical explication, if one is to describe the deeply female voice many readers hear in the text, one must move beyond ‘Images of Women’ criticism…” (“Gardens” 288). Social norms which dictate appropriate models of behavior for our children or acceptable images of femininity change; the texts do not. Alcott’s, Montgomery’s, and Burnett’s mastery of a compelling, appealing narrative voice entitle them to the serious critical consideration other Victorian and Edwardian texts receive. As long as people ignore or 127 suppress the voice inside these texts, they miss the essential quality of each woman’s art and the passionate responses they elicit.

128

Bibliography

Adams, Gillian. “Secrets and Healing Magic in ‘The Secret Garden.’” Gerzina 302-313. Print.

Ahmansson, Gabriella. “Lying and the Imagination.” Rubio and Waterston 370-381. Print.

Alcott, Bronson. “Journals.” Phillips and Eiselein 415-417. Print.

Alcott, Louisa May. Jo’s Boys . New York: New American Library Penguin, 1987. Print.

Alcott, Louisa May. “Journals and Correspondence.” Phillips and Eiselein 411-428. Print.

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women . Phillips and Eiselein 11-380. Print.

Atwood, Margaret. “Revisiting Anne .” Gammel and Epperly 222-226. Print.

Avery, Gillian. Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books 1621-1922 . Baltimore:

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Print.

Avery, Gillian. “’Remarkable and Winning’: A Hundred Years of American Heroines.” The Lion

and the Unicorn 13.1 (1989): 7-20. Project MUSE. Web. 31 October 2010.

Banerjee, Jacqueline. “Death of Children and the Victorian Novel.” Through the Northern Gate:

Childhood and Growing Up in British Fiction, 1791-1901 . New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Victorian Web. Web. 4 November 2010.

Baym, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude

Women Authors.” American Quarterly 33.2 (1981): 123-139. JSTOR . Web. 8 Jan. 2011.

Betts, Doris. “The Mockingbird’s Throat: A Personal Reflection.” Petry 135-141. Print.

Bixler, Phyllis. “Gardens, Houses, and Nurturant Power in The Secret Garden .” Gerzina 287-

301. Print.

Bixler, Phyllis. “Idealization of the Child and Childhood in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little

Lord Fauntleroy and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer .” Richardson 85-96. Print. 129

“The Boston Mind Cure: Differing Impressions of two Popular Women Writers.” New York

Times , 8 July 1885: 3. Gerzina 227-228. Print.

Brodhead, Richard H. “Alcott, Authorship, and the Postbellum Literary Field.” Phillips and

Eiselein 624-632. Print.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. “Letters.” Gerzina 215-219. Print.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. “The Magic in Children’s Books.” New York Times 14 Nov. 1920.

Gerzina 259-261. Print.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. “Mrs. Burnett Protests.” Letter to the Editor. The Critic 2 Mar. 1889.

Gerzina 229-234. Print.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden . Gerzina 3-173. Print.

Carpenter, Humphrey, and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature .

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Print.

“Children’s Literature as a Victorian Genre.” Victorian Web . 15 Aug. 2007. Web. 4 Nov. 2010.

.

Christy, Harriet R. “First Appearances: Literature in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals for

Children.” Richardson 117-133. Print.

Clark, Beverly Lyon, ed. Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary Reviews . Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.

Clark, Beverly Lyon. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America .

Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Print.

Commager, Henry Steele. “When Majors Wrote for Minors: Children’s Literature in America.”

The Commonwealth of Learning . Harper & Row: New York, 1968. 69-81. Print. 130

Davey, Frank. “Ambiguity and Anxiety in Anne of Green Gables .” Rubio and Waterston 381-

385. Print.

Davies, Robertson. “Happiness of an Inoffensive Sort.” Obituary for L.M. Montgomery.

Peterborough Examiner 2 May 1942: 4. Rubio and Waterston 340-41. Print.

De Jonge, James. “Through the Eyes of Memory: L.M. Montgomery’s Cavendish.” Gammel

268-280. Print.

Early, Gerald. “The Madness in the American Haunted House: The New Southern Gothic, and

the Young Adult Novel of the 1960s: A Personal Reflection.” Petry 93-103.

Eiselein, Gregory, and Anne K. Phillips, eds. The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia . Westport,

CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Print.

Epperly, Elizabeth R. “Romancing the Voice: Anne of Green Gables .” Rubio and Waterston 343-

359. Print.

Fiamengo, Janice. “Towards a Theory of the Popular Landscape in Anne of Green Gables .”

Gammel 225-237. Print.

Foster, Shirley, and Judy Simons. What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of ‘Classic’ Stories

for Girls . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. Print.

Foy, Nathalie. Rev. of L. M. Montgomery , by Jane Urquhart. Nathalie Foy on Books about

Books . 18 Aug. 2010. Web. 17 Apr. 2011.

Frye, Northrop. “The Pastoral Myth.” Rubio and Waterston 343. Print.

Gammel, Irene. Introduction. Anne’s World . Gammel and Lefebvre 3-16. Print.

Gammel, Irene, ed. Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2002. Print. 131

Gammel, Irene and Benjamin Lefebvre, eds. Anne’s World: A New Century of Anne of Green

Gables. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.

Gammel, Irene and Elizabeth Epperly, eds. L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture . Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 1999. Print.

Gerson, Carole. “The Triangle of Author, Publisher, and Fictional Character.” Rubio and

Waterston 309-316. Print.

Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of

The Secret Garden . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Print.

Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. “The End of an Era.” Gerzina 179-186. Print.

Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook, ed. The Secret Garden: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, and

Context, Frances Hodgson Burnett in the Press, Criticism . New York, NY: Norton, 2006.

Print.

Haire-Sargeant, Lin. American Girl to New Woman: Themes of Transformation in Books for

Girls, 1850-1925 . Diss. Tufts University, 2004. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2004. Print.

Johnston, Rosemary Ross. “L.M. Montgomery’s Interior/Exterior Landscapes.” Rubio and

Waterston 409-413. Print.

Keifer, Monica. American Children through their Books: 1700-1835 . Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1948. Print.

Kensinger, Faye Riter. Children of the Series and How They Grew or A Century of Heroines and

Heroes, Romantic, Comic, Moral . Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University

Popular Press, 1987. Print.

Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott . Knoxville:

University of Tennessee Press, 1998. Print. 132

“The Lounger.” Letter. Putnam’s Monthly . Gerzina 228-229. Print.

Lundin, Anne. “The Critical and Commercial Reception of The Secret Garden , 1911-2004.”

Gerzina 277-286. Print.

MacDonald, Ruth K. Louisa May Alcott . Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. Print.

Mackey, Margaret. “Strip Mines in the Garden: Old Stories, New Formats, and the Challenge of

Change.” Gerzina 367-386. Print.

MacLulich, T.D. “L.M. Montgomery and the Literary Heroine: Jo, Rebecca, Anne, and Emily.”

Rubio and Waterston 386-394. Print.

McMaster, Juliet. “Hair Red, Black, Gold, and Nut-Brown.” Rubio and Waterston 402-409.

Print.

Montgomery, L.M. Anne of Green Gables . Rubio and Waterston 7-245. Print.

Montgomery, L.M. “Journals.” Rubio and Waterston 271-293. Print.

Mott, Frank Luther. Golden Multitudes : The Story of Bestsellers in the United States . New York:

MacMillan, 1947. Print.

“Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett.” Berkshire Eagle 3 Dec. 1906. Gerzina 242-245. Print.

Petry, Alice Hall, ed. On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections . Knoxville: University of

Tennessee Press, 2007. Print.

Phillips, Anne K. and Gregory Eiselein, eds. Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy:

Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism . New York: Norton, 2004. Print.

Rector, Gretchen V. “Digging in the Garden: The Manuscript of The Secret Garden by Frances

Hodgson Burnett.” Gerzina 186-199. Print.

Reisen, Harriet. Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women. New York: Henry Holt,

2009. Print. 133

Rev. of Little Women , by Louisa May Alcott. Catholic World July 1869: 576. Phillips and

Eiselein 552. Print.

Rev. of Little Women , by Louisa May Alcott. The Commonwealth 24 Apr. 1869: 1. Phillips and

Eiselein 550. Print.

Rev. of Little Women , by Louisa May Alcott. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Aug. 1869: 455-

56. Phillips and Eiselein 553. Print.

Rev. of Little Women , by Louisa May Alcott. Hartford Courant qtd. in Appleton’s Journal 10

July 1869: 479. Phillips and Eiselein 551. Print.

Rev. of Little Women , by Louisa May Alcott. The Ladies’ Repository Aug. 1869: 157. Phillips

and Eiselein 552. Print.

Rev. of Little Women , by Louisa May Alcott. The National Anti-Slavery Standard 1 May 1869: 3.

Phillips and Eiselein 550. Print.

Rev. of Little Women , by Louisa May Alcott. The Spectator [London] 13 March 1869: 332.

Phillips and Eiselein 549. Print.

Rev. of Little Women, Part First , by Louisa May Alcott. Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine

Dec. 1868: 375. Phillips and Eiselein 548. Print.

Rev. of Little Women, Part First , by Louisa May Alcott. The Ladies’ Repository Dec. 1868: 472.

Phillips and Eiselein 549. Print.

Rev. of Little Women, Part First , by Louisa May Alcott. The Youth’s Companion 29 Oct. 1868:

176. Phillips and Eiselein 547. Print.

Richardson, Selma K., ed. Research About Nineteenth-Century Children and Books: Portrait

Studies . University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Graduate School of Library Science.

1980. Print. 134

Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. “Readers Reading L.M. Montgomery.” Rubio and Waterston 421-427.

Rubio, Mary Henley. Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings . Doubleday Canada, 2008.

Print.

Rubio, Mary Henley, and Elizabeth Waterston, eds. Anne of Green Gables: Authoritative Text,

Backgrounds, Criticism . New York: Norton, 2007. Print.

Rubio, Mary Henley, and Elizabeth Waterston. Writing a Life: L.M. Montgomery: A Biography

of the Author of Anne of Green Gables. Toronto: ECW, 1995. L. M. Montgomery

Research Center . University of Guelph, 11 Aug. 2008. Web. 26 Feb. 2011.

Seelye, John. Jane Eyre’s American Daughters from The Wide, Wide World to Anne of Green

Gables: A Study of Marginalized Maidens and What They Mean. Newark: University of

Delaware Press, 2005. Print.

Shields, Carol. “Exuberant Vision.” Rubio and Waterston Anne of Green Gables 428. Print.

Sicherman, Barabara. “Reading Little Women : The Many Lives of a Text.” Phillips and Eiselein

632-657. Print.

Sicherman, Barbara. “Reading and Middle-Class Identity in Victorian America.” Reading Acts:

U. S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800-1950. Ed. Barbara Ryan and Amy M.

Thomas. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. 137-160. Print.

“Social Sets of Other Cities.” Washington Post 24 July 1910. Gerzina 252-255. Print.

Stern, Madeleine B. Louisa May Alcott: A Biography . Boston: Northeastern University Press,

1999. Print.

Stern, Madeleine B. Louisa May Alcott: A Biography . Phillips and Eiselein 434-446. Print.

Stimpson, Catherine R. “Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March.”

Phillips and Eiselein 584-599. Print. 135

Stoddard, R. H. “Frances Hodgson Burnett.” Gerzina 222-225. Print.

[“Sudden Spring to Fame.”] Rev. of Anne of Green Gables , by L.M. Montgomery. English-

Canadian Literature [Toronto and Glasgow] 1913: 564. Rubio and Waterston 339. Print.

[“Sunshine and Shadow.”] Rev. of Anne of Green Gables , by L.M. Montgomery. The Globe

[Toronto] 15 Aug. 1908: F7. Rubio and Waterston 336-37. Print.

Vincent, Elizabeth. “Subversive Miss Alcott.” Phillips and Eiselein 554-556. Print.

Waterston, Elizabeth. Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery . Oxford: Oxford

University Press Canada, 2008. Print.

Waterston, Elizabeth. “To the World a Story.” Rubio and Waterston 413-421. Print.

“What Was Hid In a Garden.” Rev. of The Secret Garden , by Frances Hodgson Burnett. New

York Times 3 Sept. 1911. Gerzina 265-267. Print.

Wilkie, Christine. “Digging Up The Secret Garden : Noble Innocents or Little Savages?” Gerzina

314-323. Print.

[“Winning Our Sympathies.”] Rev. of Anne of Green Gables , by L.M. Montgomery. The

Spectator [London] 13 Mar. 1909: 426-27. Rubio and Waterston 337-38. Print.