The Literary Quality of Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and the Secret Garden

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.

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