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More Newbery Books of the 1930s
Aug. 29th, 2022 08:03 amAnother installment of Newbery Honor books of the 1930s! These three books made an interesting accidental trilogy on the topic of Attitudes Toward Women in the 1930s, with a special sidebar on What Do We Do about Tomboys?
Hilda van Stockum’s A Day on Skates is a charming and richly illustrated chapter book about a class of Dutch schoolchildren whose teacher takes them for a day-long field trip skating on the canals. They keep stopping for delicious treats, hot cocoa and snow pancakes (made with snow mixed into the batter, apparently!) and poffertjes, and it just sounds like a delightful day out. It annoyed me that the boys got all the adventures, though, while the girls got stuck washing the pancake dishes.
Fortunately an antidote was close at hand in Erick Berry’s The Winged Girl of Knossos, a thrilling adventure story loosely inspired by the story of Daedalus and Icarus - except that Icarus is gender-swapped for a daughter, Inas.
We first meet Inas diving for sponges off the coast of Crete, not because she needs sponges but just for the thrill of the thing. Inas is an all-around tomboy who aspires to jump bulls in the next festival in Knossos and loves to test the new gliders that her father has invented. (The only flying-too-close-to-the-sun is metaphorical: the people of Crete suspect black magic in Daidolos’s flying machines.)
Although the Minoans view the gliders with suspicion, they are not at all bothered by Inas’s tomboyishness: Berry’s answer to the Problem of Tomboys is “there is no problem,” and her vision of Minoan culture (based on new-to-the-1930s archaeological information) features a well-developed tomboy tradition: Inas is only one of many female bull-jumpers in Knossos. Moreover, there’s no tension over her tomboyish ways, and Inas gets along easily with more traditionally feminine women: one of her best friends is Princess Ariadne, who has developed an unfortunate interest in that doltish Greek tribute Theseus…
A lot of Inas’s disdain for Theseus arises from the fact that he (like the other Greek tributes) has no idea how to play the bulls: confronted with bulls in the arena, he clubs them inelegantly on the head. This is an excellent character detail that also says so much about Inas’s culture, and its unthinking assumption not merely of superiority but of centrality. If the Minoans know how to play the bulls, then surely all other civilized people must know too.
I really liked this book. Berry’s Knossos feels real and lived-in, her descriptions of bull-jumping are thrilling, and Inas is a delight. Stylistically it feels much more recent than it is: if I hadn’t gone into the book knowing it was written in the 1930s, I might have guessed the 1990s, or even more recent.
I struggled more with Mabel Louise Robinson’s Bright Island, which has a tomboy heroine in what you might call the “I hate all the other girls” mode. Thankful and her four older brothers grew up on an island off the coast of Maine; now only Thankful is left, and her parents decide it’s time for her to go to the mainland to get some schooling and also learn “what a girl is for.” (An actual chapter title!)
She does eventually become friends with her roommate Selina, but mostly because they realize that actually neither of them are interested in their classmate Robert, a handsome boy whose dash and charm obscure his feckless selfishness. (There's a wonderfully done sequence where Robert visits Thankful’s island home and Thankful realizes that, despite his charm, he’s a black hole of self-absorption.) But there’s no real sense of any personal connection between Thankful and Selina.
Near the end of the book, Thankful’s mother falls ill - you can tell this is one of the early Newbery books because she doesn’t die - and as she convalesces, Thankful takes over the housekeeper role, although retaining also many of her earlier tomboy traits, like a preference for old clothes and a habit of taking an early-morning swim in the icy ocean. It’s a gentler and less complete transition than in Caddie Woodlawn, perhaps the ur-tomboy book of the 1930s.
I was getting what you might call vibes from this book, particularly the scene where Thankful throws her girdle into the sea, so I looked Mabel Robinson up on Wikipedia and discovered that she was a lesbian who lived all her adult life with her partner Helen Rose. (Lest you be too impressed by my vibe-spotting, however, I was also getting vibes from Erick Berry, nee Evangel Allena Champlin Best… but she was married twice, so probably not a lesbian.)
Hilda van Stockum’s A Day on Skates is a charming and richly illustrated chapter book about a class of Dutch schoolchildren whose teacher takes them for a day-long field trip skating on the canals. They keep stopping for delicious treats, hot cocoa and snow pancakes (made with snow mixed into the batter, apparently!) and poffertjes, and it just sounds like a delightful day out. It annoyed me that the boys got all the adventures, though, while the girls got stuck washing the pancake dishes.
Fortunately an antidote was close at hand in Erick Berry’s The Winged Girl of Knossos, a thrilling adventure story loosely inspired by the story of Daedalus and Icarus - except that Icarus is gender-swapped for a daughter, Inas.
We first meet Inas diving for sponges off the coast of Crete, not because she needs sponges but just for the thrill of the thing. Inas is an all-around tomboy who aspires to jump bulls in the next festival in Knossos and loves to test the new gliders that her father has invented. (The only flying-too-close-to-the-sun is metaphorical: the people of Crete suspect black magic in Daidolos’s flying machines.)
Although the Minoans view the gliders with suspicion, they are not at all bothered by Inas’s tomboyishness: Berry’s answer to the Problem of Tomboys is “there is no problem,” and her vision of Minoan culture (based on new-to-the-1930s archaeological information) features a well-developed tomboy tradition: Inas is only one of many female bull-jumpers in Knossos. Moreover, there’s no tension over her tomboyish ways, and Inas gets along easily with more traditionally feminine women: one of her best friends is Princess Ariadne, who has developed an unfortunate interest in that doltish Greek tribute Theseus…
A lot of Inas’s disdain for Theseus arises from the fact that he (like the other Greek tributes) has no idea how to play the bulls: confronted with bulls in the arena, he clubs them inelegantly on the head. This is an excellent character detail that also says so much about Inas’s culture, and its unthinking assumption not merely of superiority but of centrality. If the Minoans know how to play the bulls, then surely all other civilized people must know too.
I really liked this book. Berry’s Knossos feels real and lived-in, her descriptions of bull-jumping are thrilling, and Inas is a delight. Stylistically it feels much more recent than it is: if I hadn’t gone into the book knowing it was written in the 1930s, I might have guessed the 1990s, or even more recent.
I struggled more with Mabel Louise Robinson’s Bright Island, which has a tomboy heroine in what you might call the “I hate all the other girls” mode. Thankful and her four older brothers grew up on an island off the coast of Maine; now only Thankful is left, and her parents decide it’s time for her to go to the mainland to get some schooling and also learn “what a girl is for.” (An actual chapter title!)
She does eventually become friends with her roommate Selina, but mostly because they realize that actually neither of them are interested in their classmate Robert, a handsome boy whose dash and charm obscure his feckless selfishness. (There's a wonderfully done sequence where Robert visits Thankful’s island home and Thankful realizes that, despite his charm, he’s a black hole of self-absorption.) But there’s no real sense of any personal connection between Thankful and Selina.
Near the end of the book, Thankful’s mother falls ill - you can tell this is one of the early Newbery books because she doesn’t die - and as she convalesces, Thankful takes over the housekeeper role, although retaining also many of her earlier tomboy traits, like a preference for old clothes and a habit of taking an early-morning swim in the icy ocean. It’s a gentler and less complete transition than in Caddie Woodlawn, perhaps the ur-tomboy book of the 1930s.
I was getting what you might call vibes from this book, particularly the scene where Thankful throws her girdle into the sea, so I looked Mabel Robinson up on Wikipedia and discovered that she was a lesbian who lived all her adult life with her partner Helen Rose. (Lest you be too impressed by my vibe-spotting, however, I was also getting vibes from Erick Berry, nee Evangel Allena Champlin Best… but she was married twice, so probably not a lesbian.)
