Heroines

Out of interest, the other day, I pulled a list of ‘Children’s Classics’ off Wikipedia.  There are 66 titles, and Aesop’s Fables heads the list with William Caxton’s edition of 1484.  Apart from a couple of pretty obscure titles - at least, I have never heard of ‘A Token for Children’ by James Janeway, and ‘A Pretty Little Pocket Book’ by John Newbery - I can hand on heart say that I encountered most of them during my own childhood.  ‘Robinson Crusoe’?  Tick.  ‘Ivanhoe’?  ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’? ‘The Coral Island’?  Tick.  ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’?  ‘Uncle Remus’?  ‘Black Beauty’?  ‘Treasure Island’?  ‘The Happy Prince’? Tick, tick, tick.  And so on. 

The list is familiar even though I doubt many of today’s children would consider ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, ‘David Copperfield’, or even ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ to be tremendously riveting stuff.  Nor were many of them expressly written for children.  But so what?  We were tougher nuts back in my childhood.  I happily gnawed my way through ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘The Children of the New Forest’.  I expected roughage in my reading, and I got it. 

What strikes me now, though, is the extreme scarcity of heroines. Fairytales apart, there are only 12 stories out of the entire 66 in which the main character is female: these are: ‘Little Goody Twoshoes’ (1765), ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) and ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (1871), ‘Little Women’ (1868), ‘What Katy Did’ (1873), ‘Heidi’ (1884), ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ (1900), ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm’ (1903), ‘Pollyanna’ (1913), ‘A Little Princess’ (1905), ‘Anne of Green Gables’ (1908), and perhaps ‘The Secret Garden’. There are some deceptive titles which sound as though they are going to be about heroines, such as ‘Lorna Doone’ (1869) and ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ (1871) but these are really far more about the male protagonists, John Ridd and Curdie.

  

Even though the last book on the list was published in 1918, many – in fact most – of these titles formed part of my reading a full half century later, as a child growing up in the sixties. I can’t say I consciously noticed the absence of strong female characters, since naturally I identified with the hero, whoever he might be.  I swam lagoons with Jack, Ralph and Peterkin, roistered and swashbuckled with D’Artagnan, escaped across the heather with Alan Breck, roamed the jungle with Mowgli – but I did notice the rare occasions when a feisty heroine was presented to me.  This, I think, is why so many of us loved – loved – Katy Carr, Jo March and Anne of Green Gables.  We were resigned to girly girls in books.  We were used to them needing to be rescued, and swooning on manly breasts (Lorna Doone).  Or being sweetly domestic, decorative, helpless and good.  (David Copperfield’s Dora.)  Or ill-treated victims (Sara Crewe).  Or simply not there at all. It was a literary world in which boys were allowed to be Peter Pan but girls were condemned to be Wendy.

So we were thrilled when Katy lost her temper, disobeyed her aunt and swung in that swing; and all the Victorian business of being an invalid and becoming the heart of the family hardly seemed to count in comparison.  Some of Susan Coolidge's writing is still extremely funny, and you can sense her delighting in her heroine's realistically child-like outbursts.  Here's Katy inventing a break-time game:

…Katy’s unlucky star put it into her head to invent a new game, which she called the Game of Rivers.  It was played in the following manner: - each girl took the name of a river and laid out for herself an appointed path through the room, winding among the desks and benches, and making a low roaring sound, to imitate the noise of water.  Cecy was the Plate; Marianne Brooks, a tall girl, the Mississippi; Alice Blair, the Ohio; Clover, the Penobscot, and so on.  They were instructed to run into each other once in a while because, as Katy said, ‘rivers do’.  As for Katy herself, she was ‘Father Ocean’, and, growling horribly, raged up and down the platform where Mrs Knight usually sat.  Every now and then… she would suddenly cry out, ‘Now for a meeting of the waters!’ whereupon all the rivers bouncing, bounding, scrambling, screaming, would turn and run towards Father Ocean, while he roared louder than all of them put together, and made short rushes up and down, to represent the movement of waves on a beach.

Of course they get into trouble, but anyone can see it would be worth it to have such fun.  And Jo March, too, could lose her temper, and acted – in boots! – and wrote stories, and did things.  Mary in ‘The Secret Garden’ is angry – very angry – for a lot of the time.  Even transplanted Heidi yearns for her Alp and her grumpy grandfather, and eventually gets her way.  While as for Anne – impulsive, rebellious, outspoken Anne –   

“How dare you call me skinny and ugly?  How dare you say I’m freckled and red-headed?  How would you like to have such things said about you?  How would you like to be told that you are fat and clumsy and probably hadn’t a spark of imagination in you?  I don’t care if I do hurt your feelings by saying so!  I hope I hurt them.  You have hurt mine worse than they were ever hurt before even by Mrs Thomas’s intoxicated husband.  And I’ll never forgive you for it, never, never!”

Such girls seemed to be going places.  The trouble was that there wasn’t really anyplace for them to go.  I don’t know why the imaginations of the women who created them could come up with so few goals in an era that was producing strong women by the bucketload: in the States, the early suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; in Britain reformers like Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, the Pankhursts. But it was an era where perhaps to be a little girl was to have more freedom of behaviour than a grown woman.  Anne of Green Gables becomes Anne of Ingleside, a teacher, marries Gilbert Blythe and has children.  Jo marries Professor Bhaer not Laurie (this we could hardly forgive, though it may be more realistic!); she does become a writer, but then goes all matriarchal and nurturing and 'womanly'.  Katy travels to Europe and marries a young naval officer who is attracted to her because of her – wait for it – selfless nursing skills. 

So the vigorous rushing rivers of Katy’s game end up flowing decorously into the great calm land-locked sea of wife-and-motherhood.  Still, at least these books gave some expression, some release, some validity to the passion and energy of growing girls.  Nowadays we take it for granted.  My own daughters have never been interested in Little Women or Anne of Green Gables.  They don’t find Jo an exciting rebel but a prissy homebody taking covered baskets of Christmas dinner to the poor, selflessly selling her hair. (Her hair?  What?  Why?)

In Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’, how I and my schoolfriends identified with the tomboy George, who cut her curly hair, wore shorts, owned a dog, told the truth at all costs and was brave and passionate.  How much better she was than sissy Anne (who wore a plaid skirt and a hairslide)!  And yet, and yet – that cry of hers, “I’m as good as a boy any day” – is the very mark of inequality.  Why should a girl have to masquerade as a boy to be taken seriously?  Why should bravery, independence and action be seen as masculine qualities?

We shouldn’t be complacent.  I can think of plenty of independent, strong heroines in modern children’s fiction – Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite would come top of my personal list, in books like ‘Night Birds on Nantucket’ and ‘The Cuckoo Tree’; and Harriet of ‘Harriet the Spy’; Lyra in ‘The Golden Compass', the gallant Sabriel of Garth Nix's 'Sabriel' . These girls aren’t trying to prove that they are as good as or better than boys.  They simply get on with life and grapple with its problems. My own books have so far figured boy and girl main characters of equal rank.  Hilde in the Troll books is much more confident and outgoing than diffident, self-doubting Peer, while Nest, heroine of ‘Dark Angels’/’The Shadow Hunt’ is at least equal to the young hero Wolf in passion and poise.  But there are still many books for teenagers in which the heroines need – rely on – yearn for – the strong arms and love of some idealised boy. ‘Twilight’ springs instantly to mind. Compare Bella to Katy Carr or Jo March - it's hard to imagine either of them languishing after 'perfect' Edward.  

Of all the girls in all the titles on this list of classic books for children, the most independent of all must be Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who calmly steers her way through the looking glass wonderlands of her own imagination.  Alice does not feel in the least inferior to any male character.   She stands up for herself in her own very feminine way, experimenting, chopping logic, lecturing herself and others, refusing to be snubbed, insulted or put in her place.  At the end of each book, when the world threatens her, she pulls it down about her ears like Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple in Gaza.  She is extraordinary – and the creation of a man.  But she is pre-adolescent: what does the world really hold for ‘alices when they are jung and easily freudened’?  Carroll’s Alice touches a kind of bedrock: a certainty of self-worth that may be felt by many little girls in stable and happy families – but which is still all too easily lost as the teens commence. 

Alice, Creator and Destroyer

I once read, I think in an essay by C.S. Lewis – that to have weird or unusual protagonists in a fantasy world was gilding the lily. Simply too much icing on a very fancy cake. And then he cited Alice as a good example of an ordinary child to whom strange things happen.  I’m not sure he was right.

Of course it’s true that many heroes and heroines in classic 20^th century fantasy are ‘ordinary’ – hobbits, for example; and Lewis’s own Pevensie children, and Alan Garner’s Colin and Susan in ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ and ‘The Moon of Gomrath’.  There’s a pleasure in seeing an ordinary person rise to the occasion, as when Bilbo Baggins turns out to be a very good burglar indeed, or when Frodo self-sacrificingly takes on the burden of the Ring. Tolkien must have seen many instances of ‘ordinary’ heroism in the trenches of World War I. 

And I’d agree that one does need to able to identify with characters in fantasy. For me, one of the difficulties of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is that apart from Titus and Fuschia there are too few characters for whom one can feel any empathy.  Although I love the setting and the descriptions of the immense castle and its strange ritual life, I become emotionally exhausted by Peake’s cast of grotesques.  Peake had, it’s fair to say, a line on the darker side of life.  And not coincidentally for this post, he illustrated the two Alice books.  Just look at his picture of Alice emerging out of the mirror into Looking-Glass Land, and compare it with Tenniel’s.

Tenniel’s Alice is barely halfway through the mirror.  She looks not at us, but around and down at the room with an expression of calm interest.   She is a little excited, perhaps, but not alarmed.  We don’t feel there in the room waiting for her: instead, we are looking through the window of the picture.  We can glimpse part of the room.  The grinning clock is strange but not threatening.  The room itself appears to be well lit.  In Tenniel’s drawing, Alice is firmly planted on the mantelshelf.  She has a chance to look around, and will jump down when she chooses.

 

Peake’s Alice appears through the misty glass like an apparition.  She looks straight into our eyes, as if we are the first thing she sees. Her face is very white, and so are her hands, outspread as if pressing through the glass, but also gesturing an ambiguous mixture of alarm and conjuration.  She is coming out of darkness, and there are no reflections to suggest what the looking glass room may contain – except us, for we are already there, waiting for her.  (We may not be friendly).  With one leg waving over the drop, she is about to fall off the mantelshelf into the room – for her position is precarious.

Even the 1951 Disney cartoon recognised the tough element in Alice’s character, and the latent terror in Wonderland.  They made her into a prim little cutie, but she still managed to stand up to the frightening Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter.  

So how ordinary is Alice, after all – is she really just an innocent and rather pedestrian Every-little-girl in a mad, mad world?  Or does she have her own brand of illogical weirdness with which to combat the weirdness she finds?  I think she does, and I think modern readers often miss it.  We look at the blonde hair, the hairband, the blue dress and the white pinafore, and forget her speculative, inventive mind, her impatience – and passages like this:

And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse!  Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone!” 

Compare that with George MacDonald’s heroine in ‘The Princess and The Goblin’. Can you imagine Princess Irene doing anything so bizarre? Irene is truthful and brave, but always a little lady – the Victorian gentleman’s ideal child. The adventures that happen to Irene are not of her own creation. But it’s Alice’s weird imaginings about what might be happening on the other side of the glass – that take her into Looking Glass Land at all. Alice is both a credibly strong-minded little girl – capable of losing her temper, of defending herself in the White Rabbit’s house by kicking Bill the lizard up the chimney – and a surreal philosopher, as some children are. She is the maker of her own imaginary worlds and when they get too chaotic, she ends them – amid considerable violence. 

“Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”    

            At this the whole pack rose up into the air and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off…

(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried as she jumped up and seized the tablecloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.

            “And as for you,” she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen… “I’ll shake you into a kitten, that I will!” 

(Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass)

Tenniel’s illustrations catch the vivid threat and drama of the situation.  In Peake's, lit by three tall sinister candles, it looks as if Alice and the two Queens are being sucked into a black hole.  

Some books with dream endings can feel like a cheat. ‘And she woke up, and it was only a dream’ seems to negate all that has happened. But in the case of Alice, the dream settings are absolutely necessary. She has not strayed into a pre-existing Narnia like Lucy Pevensie.  She is the Alpha and Omega of her own fantasylands. She is, like dreaming Brahma, the creator and destroyer of worlds: and when she awakens from her dreams, it is utterly logical that Wonderland and Looking Glass Land will cease to be.