Problematic Favorites: A Little Princess - Part 1: Introduction

[hrj]

I’m finding that the new Wednesday series of research squibs is being more creative work than I’m happy about currently, so I thought I’d jump the tracks to a different series that I’ve been contemplating for years.

Sometimes we like things that we know are problematic. Sometimes it takes us a while to realize many of the problematic aspects of things we like. And sometimes we aren’t sure how to engage with that aspect of things we like. For a number of years, I’ve been promising myself to expiate the problematic aspects of one of my favorite comfort-reads by dong a detailed examination and dissecting what it is about it that appeals to me, and what parts of it make me wince and why. So for the foreseeable future, my Wednesday blog is going to be a detailed, chapter-by-chapter critique and celebration of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel A Little Princess.

It’s a story with some really delightful themes: I love the way the entire world of the story centers around female characters, and the way the protagonist is shown to struggle to follow her better impulses, and the overall symbolic structure of how the protagonist earns her happy ending. And it’s a story with some seriously problematic shit: like orientalism and colonialism, and some peculiar gaps in its critique of class, and a rather nauseating equation of being fat with lower intelligence, and some plot holes you could drive a coach-and-four through.

And yet I come back to this story again and again. Back when I was in grad school and avoiding fiction that made me work too hard (because my academic reading sucked up all my reading energy), I’d do a Little Princess re-read any time I needed a pick-me-up. When I started having massive problems with insomnia and discovered that running audiobooks was the best mitigation I could find, the Librivox.org recording of A Little Princess read by Karen Savage went into heavy rotation (with its only flaw being that it doesn’t run quite long enough to cover the whole night). So rather than simply calling it my “guilty pleasure” (a term I hate), I decided to do penance by acknowledging the flaws while explaining why I keep coming back.

This first installment is going to be a bit of background, and then I’m going to begin working through the book chronologically (though I’ll be bouncing around when discussing themes and plot-holes). Spoilers will abound, but dammit the book was published over a hundred years ago. Statute of limitations and all that.

The Wikipedia entry on the novel gives some interesting background, including that it was an expansion of a previous, much less detailed novella, and may have been inspired by an unfinished fragment by Charlotte Brontë. Burnett was a prolific writer of both children’s and adult fiction, though she is best known now for the former. In addition to A Little Princess, the works people are most likely to have heard of include The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy, all of which have a continuing theme of children who have lost their parents (although in the case of LLF, the loss of his mother is temporary), are massively displaced from their original place of residence, and eventually are beneficiaries of wealthy and privileged men with some indirect family connection to them.

One suspects a certain amount of authorial wish-fulfillment, given that Burnett’s father died when she was very young, and her family moved from England to the USA in impoverished circumstances when she was a teenager (she began writing to help support her family). She never relied on a wealthy benefactor, however, and even though her husband became a physician early in their marriage, she was the primary breadwinner of the family, enabling them to enjoy international travel and rather lavish socializing.

The basic plot of A Little Princess involves the riches-to-rags-to-riches story of motherless Sara Crewe, who is sent from a life of colonial privilege in India to boarding school in London and, after establishing her place in the schoolgirl pecking order, loses everything when her father simultaneously loses his fortune and his life. Sara is demoted from “princess” to scullery maid at the school and struggles to maintain a positive approach to life until, as a reward for her inherent virtue, she is discovered by her late father’s business partner who restores her fortunes and whisks her away to a life of comfort and affection.

Next week, I’ll lay out the basics of why the story appeals to me and begin Chapter One.

Comments

[katerit.livejournal.com]

This is one of my favorite stories as well, so I will be interested in your commentary.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

It'll be interesting to compare what it is about the story that appeals to different people.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I haven't read A Little Princess, but I am still very fond of The Secret Garden. I did so identify with Mary Lennox when I was a small girl and I enjoyed it when I re-read it recently, though the depiction of Dickon's family did make me cringe reading it as an adult.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

The Secret Garden is also in my audio rotation, though nowhere near as heavily. It's interesting to do a compare-and-contrast between Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox, at least in terms of starting circumstances. (Both orphans and both sent back to England from colonial India.) I suppose the big message in comparing them is how much being a loved and wanted child influences personality!

[trystbat.livejournal.com]

Ooooo, this should be good! I love the story too, despite its Issues, & have read it over & over. I also keep wanting to review & compare some of the film versions bec., whoa, they add to the problems.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping for some lively discussion! For me, the only film version that is even tolerable is the 1986 mini-series. Even apart from how much gets cut from a regular movie-length production, it keeps more of the essential dynamics intact. I'm sorry, but any film version that ends up with, "And her father is really still alive!" betrays the book entirely, for me. *cough* Shirley Temple *cough*

[joycebre.livejournal.com]

I used to watch that (the Shirley Temple version) before I could read. :) I was very surprised to find out he dies in the book.
(and while I like it, it really is problematic. Who wouldn't want a sugar daddy?)

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

Is the 1986 one the BBC Sunday tea-time series with Nigel Havers playing the yellow gentleman?

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Yes, that one.

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

I loved that one, largely because we got a proper look at Jessie and Lavinia.

[fighter-chick.livejournal.com]

A Little Princess was one of my childhood favorites, and I've reread it several times as an adult. I'm excited to read your commentary, because I have many of the same loves yet see many of the same problems you've laid out in your intro here.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I'm excited to hear your views on it as well.

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in the topic but I note a couple of glosses about Frances Hodgson Burnett's life which, given you're talking about it in the context of an examination of the colonial, class and racism issues with it, I find a little troubling. First, you say:

"her family moved from England to the USA in impoverished circumstances when she was a teenager (she began writing to help support her family)"

True, but incomplete. Her family moved from the industrialised county of Lancashire (specifically Manchester) as a direct result of the US Civil War. Lancashire's economy depended on weaving cotton, the raw material of which came from the American South, and its slave-worked plantations. Burnett's family were engaged in the cotton business. However on the outbreak of war Lancashire did not do what many people predicted it would and support the Confederacy, on whom its livelihood depended. Instead, it came out against slavery (we have the direct testimony of Abraham Lincoln, who described this as "An act of sublime Christian heroism, which has not been seen before in any age or clime"). Burnett's family life was destroyed (or, at best, severely disrupted) because her home county stood up in the crunch time for a principle of social justice. When you look at her characters like Sara Crewe or Loristan in the Lost Prince, it's worth noting that she knew at first hand what the cost of principle before person means - in some respects, you can say that what she's writing is "fixit" fic, to show that the sacrifice is worth it (and when she glorifies the Yankee spirit, as she does in Little Lord Fauntleroy and her adult novel, The Shuttle, that's part of her convincing herself that they backed the right side.)
Secondly, you say, "even though her husband became a physician early in their marriage, she was the primary breadwinner of the family, enabling them to enjoy international travel and rather lavish socializing." In fact, again the biography shows that Swan Burnett was an exploitative leech who took and took and spent and spent his wife's money (she funded him through med school) and they later divorced.

None of this excuses problematic elements in the work, but I think it certainly explains many issues which could be interpreted either way.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Yes, Burnett's background is a lot more complex than my summary above. Thanks so much for jumping in to particpate! (Even the Wikipedia entry glosses over a lot of this stuff.) The recurring themes of invalid characters may be drawing heavily on her personal experience as well. And her characters have a fascinating blend of socially progressive attitudes and jarring blind spots. (Wait until you get to my rant on, "And Becky, as your reward for unwavering friendship and loyalty you get...to continue being a servant! But at least you'll be well treated now!")

I'd love for you to contribute to the discussion as I go along. It sounds like you've read a lot more of her catalog than I have. (I've been tracking down some of her other works that exist in audio.)

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

Part of Becky's problem, as the book (frustratingly) touches on but does not expand on is that she is both illiterate or (at best) semi-literate and has accent and mannerisms which are violently marking her as inferior in Victorian society. If one compares Becky and Ram Dass (which I don't think I've ever seen anyone do) you see that Ram Dass is characterised by "educated" speech patterns (his language is sometimes flowery but never depicted in pidgin) whereas Becky's dialect is rendered phonetically. They are both Othered by the narrative but semi de-Othered by Sara's relationship with them. It's telling that the structural inequalities between Sara and Ram Dass on the one hand and Becky on the other cannot be bridged by Sara, but (given that Sara as an individual cannot dismantle either the British Empire or the class system) where do you think she falls short in what she attempts to do, given that none of the players can act independently of structural pressures? I mean, for example, that A Little Princess is set in 1880 or thereabouts, and Sara is 12/13. She will not get the vote until she is 50 (at the earliest). Yet she could enrich Ram Dass sufficiently for him to have the vote next week (in 1880 time). But then India won't be free of British rule until 30 years after Sara gets the vote, by which time Ram Dass will be either dead or a very old man.

It's swings and roundabouts, but swings go backwards and roundabouts come round.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's not that I think the story itself could have made other choices. It's that I'm interested in analyzing how the story structures the underlying values and attitudes that make those outcomes seem not only natural, but positive within the context.

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

I'm never quite sure how far Burnett's somewhat strange religious beliefs (theosophy, I think) feed into her work. It's very noticeable in The Lost Prince, where there's a lot of mysticism, and it ties into one character's determination effectively to become a sort of philosopher king. And there's clearly a belief in some sort of active telepathy going on in some of what's happening in that book and The secret Garden.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

The Lost Prince is one of the ones I've picked up an audio version of but haven't listened to yet. (Unlike my anti-insomnia listening, I need to pick a time when I want to be awake to listen to new books!)

Colin's philosophies in The Secret Garden strike me as falling in the general category of "power of positive thinking", with vague echoes of neurolinguistic programming. Not saying there's a direct connection, but those were the associations it evoked for me. Of course, those modern versions have more than a bit of mysticism when looked at from the right angle.

The telepathy-like thing in SG felt to me like it could simply have been intended as literary device as opposed to authorial belief, but only to the extent that it didn't throw me out of the story.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Burnett's family life was destroyed (or, at best, severely disrupted) because her home county stood up in the crunch time for a principle of social justice.

I never knew this, and I would love to read more. Do you have recommendations for where to learn about Frances Hodgson Burnett, slavery, and Manchester?

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

Two of the most significant items are the address from the Manchester cotton operatives of something like 31 December 1861 and the reply by Abraham Lincoln in February 1862. Both of these were published in the Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian) and can be found by Googling terms like "Cotton Famine" or "Free Trade Hall American Civil War". Burnett's use of the Doxology ("Praise God from whom all blessings flow") in The Secret Garden is a direct echo of how the starving Liverpool cotton workers stood on the docks and sang that song as the first bales of cotton from the post Civil War US arrived in Lancashire.

It's also worth reading That Lass o' Lowries which is an early novel for adults by Burnett dealing with a "pit brow lassie" (one of the female surface coal workers of the 19th century whose practical costume involving trousers got itself fetishised by Victorian "gentlemen" who passed around clandestine photos) who protects her middle-class lover from danger (she secretly walks him home at night because she thinks he shouldn't be walking alone at night in that district), stands up to domestic violence, protects a stigmatised unmarried mother and goes down into a collapsing mine as part of a rescue mission (the other miners take the view that even though she's a women "nowt fears her" and therefore she is fully entitled to take her place as an equal with the men.

But it doesn't fit the narrative of Burnett as the unthinking child of privilege, so tends to be ellided from the discourse about her life and work.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Huh. Googling for further data, I found Burnett's memoir of her childhood, The One I Knew Most Of All. Pages 237-239 connect the war in America, which the child Frances imagines using her reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin, with the trouble in the cotton mills: "The stories of the starving operatives became as terrible as the stories from America. Side by side with accounts of battles there were, in the newspapers, accounts of the 'Lancashire Distress,' as it was called."

And here, as you said, is the Doxology:

"There came at last a time when the war was ended, and there was a pathetic story of the first bales of cotton being met by a crowd of hunger- and trouble-worn factory operatives with sobs and tears, and cries of rapturous welcome - and of one man - perhaps a father who had sat by a fireless hearth, broken of spirit and helpless, while his young swarm cried for bread - a poor gaunt fellow who, lifting his hat, with tears running down his cheeks, raised his voice in the Doxology, one after another joining in, until the whole mass sang, in one great swelling chorus."

Thank you for introducing me to this history; I never knew, and it does complicate the narrative. I'll track down the other materials you mentioned too.

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, my mother was on the sea front at Rhyl, North Wales (so about 30 miles from Liverpool as the crow flies) on VE day, and she told me the same thing happened; one person beginning to sing and the entire crowd joining in. That was Bread of Heaven, rather than the Doxology, but it's almost exactly the same sentiment:

Guide me, O thou great Redeemer,
Pilgrim through this barren land;
I am weak, but thou art mighty;
Hold me with thy powerful hand:
Bread of heaven, bread of heaven
Feed me till I want no more.
Feed me till I want no more.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

I am decidedly interested. I'm another whose chief comfort read was The Secret Garden, not A Little Princess, but I did read both, and I have been afraid to revisit A Little Princess because its problematic elements jump out at me more. A reading that is both affectionate and aware sounds like just the thing.

As a child, I could never bring myself to hunt out any of her more obscure books, for fear I'd see even more of the tropes I could already identify her leaning on, and learn she was the writer of a hundred roughly identical books (I couldn't have phrased it that way, of course). As an adult, it's been for fear of slamming into something very problematic indeed.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I think one reason for my preference is the female-centric world of A Little Princess.

And I should note that I do feel a streak of "But for her time..." in regard to her books. But that's exactly why I want to address the problems head-on and say, "Yes, I recognize the issues here, and recognize that this may kill the enjoyment for some, but here -- this -- is what I do like about the book."

[lferion]

I shall be reading (and hopefully participating) with great interest. Both "A Little Princess" and "The Secret Garden" are significant books to me.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I do seem to have hit on a popular topic!

[sacchig.livejournal.com]

The Secret Garden was my very favorite book as a child, a bit ahead of A Little Princess probably because I loved the Yorkshire Moors setting so much. By now, of course, I realize how disturbing the class differentiation looks to us today, but to me Dickon was the hero, and my favorite character.

I didn't know about the Pit Lassie book, but now I'll have to search it out. Martin Cruz Smith wrote a novel a few years ago, Rose, about, among other things, "pit girls" at the coal mines, and it was fascinating.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I've always found Dickon a far more sympathetic character than Colin. Colin rather goes from self-pitying hypochondriac to self-important egotist. Not saying he doesn't have motivations for both, but I find it hard to like him. Whereas Mary has a solidly sympathetic arc straight through. You understand where she's starting from, but her changes feel real and well-motivated.

[ursula]

Have you read Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Lady of Quality? It's not a good book, exactly (though the cross-dressing stuff at the beginning is very satisfying), but the heroine does one thing that would've doomed her to death in just about every other nineteenth-century novel I've read, and another thing that would've doomed her in just about every twentieth-century novel I've read, and lives happily ever after anyway.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I haven't read that one, though I confess I've watched a video adaptation. Yeah: full of tropes that you expect to go to much different places!

[batshua]

I would love to know more about other books France Hodgson Burnett wrote; I only have The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy.

I must confess I am filled with trepidation at the idea of directly viewing the problems in my faves, but I'm also looking forward to the discussion.

[scotica.livejournal.com]

My favorite Burnett novel is The Lost Prince—read it repeatedly as a child. I also liked A Little Princess, and am finally going back and reading this whole series of commentary. Really enjoying the analysis!

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I have that one on audio but haven't listened to it yet. *makes note to add to audiobooks*