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Problematic Favorites: A Little Princess – Part 35 Comeuppance
In the second half of Chapter 18, we finally have the satisfaction of seeing Miss Minchin receive her just desserts, though it's a very self-inflicted and forgiving comeuppance. Miss Minchin, having heard from one of the housemaids that Sara had gone into Mr. Carrisford's house, comes in high dudgeon to fetch her back, only to find her worst nightmare has come true: Sara has turned out to be a "princess" after all, with a wealthy benefactor who knows the whole sad story of Sara's degradation. We see Miss Minchin's worldviews come crashing into each other. She tries to lay claim to being Sara's friend--after all, she didn't throw her out on the street when she could have!--and attempts to slip back into the role of flattering wealth and power. But Sara is having none of it, and Carrisford has no reason to follow any lead but Sara's. (Though this is, perhaps, less believable in the real world, where adults often reflexively support each other against the testimony of children.) When Sara holds fast to her own truth, Miss Minchin tries to turn and bite, threatening Sara with the loss of access to her friends and telling Carrisford that his new ward is "neither truthful nor grateful." It's a last stab and falls short.
And now we see Miss Minchin's edifice of control tumble down. Just as she failed to maintain her chosen narrative against Sara, she now fails to maintain control over her household. Miss Amelia challenges her version of the truth and makes it clear that she won't subordinate her conscience to her sister's lead in the future. The pupils are in an uncomtrolled uproard, knowing only that something is up, until Sara resolves their confusion in the form of a letter to Ermengarde, explaining the whole matter. There is an intimation that Sara's sudden good fortune will rub off on Ermengarde, not only via access to Sara's fabulous new/restored life of privilege, but by conveying status as Sara's friend that will fortify Ermengarde in her relations with the other girls.
Now we get to the episode where the possible realities of the story seem utterly unfair to me. And where analysis by Moral Accounting indicates that the fact of being born into a life of hard labor and uncertainty is not treated as a "credit" (and therefore inherently worthy of being balanced by reward) in the same way that being born to a life of wealth and privilege is treated as a "debt" (and therefore a state that requires balance by going through trials.)
Becky realizes that Sara's escape and the restoration of her "princess" status means the loss of her own access to Sara's friendship and the pretend worlds that had made her own life worth enduring--as well as the loss of the magical transformed attic. For nobody would continue mysteriously providing food and heat and comfort for an ordinary scullery maid. And--to a certain extent--Becky's fears are correct. Recall that Becky was only given second-hand inclusion in The Magic, and only because Sara automatically included her in every part of the good fortune. If it had been left entirely to Mr. Carrisford, no doubt Becky would have been forgotten. But Sara didn't forget her. Sara sends Ram Dass across the attic roof one last time to give Becky reassurance. Becky is to come join her at Mr. Carrisford's house...as her personal maid.
Somehow it seems a betrayal. Sara could have continued to see Becky as "just another little girl like me". They had shared all their sorrows and small comforts for two years. Sara had made sure that Becky was included in every piece of fortune she received, whether it was sharing Ermengarde's food hamper or enjoying the gifts of her mysterious benefactor. But now, when Sara has the wealth and power and freedom to do pretty much anything she wants, the most she can find to offer Becky is a slightly higher position in service? It wouldn't occur to Becky to question the arrangement. She always knew that their apparent equality was an illusion. Sara never stopped being "miss" to her. But it seems an unexpected failure of Sara's imagination not to suggest adopting Becky as a sister and an equal, now that she has the power to do so.
To be sure, it might not be the kindest thing to do in the long run. It's unlikely that Becky would ever be comfortable being elevated to such a status. When I brought up this issue at the begining of this series, some commenters pointed out that raising a working class girl up to the middle class would have been a much less possible thing than a middle class girl falling nito poverty. But I wish Sara had thought to try, because it makes me think less of her.
Next week I'll look at the somewhat different fate of Anne, and how she demonstrates the lasting effects of Sara's example. And I'll do some sort of sum-up of why I've done this series. It's been an interesting project.
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However, I do see the fact that both Ram Dass and later Miss Minchen use the term "attendant" when describing Becky's status as enormously loaded in class terms, and in a good way. If it had been "a slightly higher position in service" we were talking about, the term would have been "ladies' maid" (the position which Mariette had held). Particularly in the "princess" context "attendant" brings Becky conceptually closer to "lady in waiting" or perhaps "paid companion". "Paid companion" roles were typically given to poor relations (think of Mrs Annesley in Pride and Prejudice who carries out this role for Georgiana.)
I think Becky is meant to be in class transition at the end of the book, with the attendant role (and terminology) putting her into a hybrid position.
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You make a point I hadn't thought of regarding the word "attendant". I hadn't put any particular weight on that word choice because of my questions around Ram Dass's multi-lingualism. (It's a plot necessity that he's speaking English to Becky -- breaking the previous claim that he only speaks Hindi -- but the stiltedness of the phrasing suggests the possibility of a memorized message, in which case it would presumably bet Carrisford's word choice.
The big difference in our approaches here (beyond the issues of cultural background) is that you're treating the question in terms of real-life sociology while I'm looking at the symbolic structure of the plot. It may be *realistic* that Becky could never attain class mobility, no matter what support she was given, but it's also *meaningful* in the context of what is clearly a moralizing story.
I'll get into this more in my sum-up, but one of the purposes of writing this series is to point out and acknowledge that my enjoyment of the moral structure of the story with regard to Sara is at the expense of a story, a setting, and a worldview that says to people, "You can be these things and nothing else." The story is structured so that Sara can become the things she aspires to (understanding that "princess" is always meant metaphorically). If the character I most identified with were Becky or Ram Dass, then I would be reading different stories -- ones where they could realize their own desires without being the wallpaper to someone else's story.
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A Little Princess is not a realistic story for all the reasons discussed, including the fact that Lottie, Lavinia et al remain frozen in time at the ages they were when Sara first meets them while she speeds past in front of them. However, it's not an overtly supernatural story either; in furnishing and heating the attic no magic is in fact deployed, even though the laws of physics are stretched a bit and one does have to consider "Is the local bobby too involved in canoodling with Cook not even to notice that people are skylarking on the roofs of these houses at all hours of the day and night?"
(Actually, from the first time I read it until and including this time round I always think the delivery of the clothes comes perilously close to detroying the suspension of disbelief that Miss Minchen won't find out about The Magic; it ties "good things happening to Sara" very precisely to her being "the little girl in the right hand attic" which of course orients the viewpoint of the person sending the parcel in a way which would obviously mean "House Next Door" to anyone who applied a bit of thought to the issue. However, H-B has done just about enough to establish Miss Minchen as incurious and fundamentally stupid for it to just about skate over this problem, but the whole edifice did teeter there for a moment.)
So one of the key balancing acts which H-B has to bring off is spinning an implausible tale which never falls over into "impossible".
And though the British class system isn't actually a law of physics, it certainly seems like it from my perspective (which is very much culturally conditioned by being a British woman from a working class background) when it comes to what I can swallowwhen it comes to suspension of disbelief. There's also a moral issue, for me, in terms of how far is it permissible to down-play real-world issues of massive structural inequality for the sake of writing a specific sort of happy ending.*
Downward class mobility is the peril underpinning the whole plot. If you think about class as a big rock cliff, Sara is on her way down; she's fallen far but she's a long way from the bottom. Becky and Anne are perched on successive ledges way below her. To the extent possible by her own circumstances, she can send down ropes and give them words of encouragement and recognise that they're sharing similar struggles to go upwards (or at least prevent themselves from falling further down), but what she can't do alone is demolish the cliff.
And fiction in general and H-B's in particular tends to prioritise individual effort not collective solutions (H-B gets closer to seeing that actually collective action is the answer in books like That Lass o'Lowries and The Shuttle but even there it tends to be committees of philanthropists rather than trade union organisers and ILP M.P.s).
And I'm very wary about solutions which ignore or minimise the existence of the cliff or seem to suggest that it's equally easy to climb up from the bottom on a crust of bread every two days as it is from three quarters of the way up, with sherpas and oxygen, because they lead to victim-blaming, ie suggesting that people who aren't at the top of the cliff yet are failing because of laziness or lack of application. And that sort of accusation is very much the common currency of British politics in the age of austerity.
*When I was a kid, politics when it came to kidlit had swung through 180 degrees, and it became anathema to write any kind of happy ending for working class characters, so we got a plethora of award-winning novels about decaying tower blocks, firebombs in Belfast, teen pregnancy, gangs and knife crime. It was just as class-determinist as A Little Princess, but the Guardian felt better about reviewing it.
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