100 Books, #3: Hattie and the Wild Waves

[osprey_archer]

Barbara Cooney’s Hattie and the Wild Waves might also be called Portrait of the Artist as a Little Girl, and as such I identified excessively with the heroine, Hattie. I dreamed of being a writer, not a painter - I don’t know when I first dreamed it, but it was a fixed star in my mind by second grade - but the common creative urge was there.

Plus, her family went to a summer house on Far Rockaway. Could a name be more redolent of magic than Far Rockaway? The seaside scenes were my favorites in the book, along with Hattie painting the black swans from China.

Hattie is your typical tomboy heroine with an artistic twist. She loves to stand in the prow of her father’s boat, where “the moist salt breezes took all the curl out of her hair.” She hates standing for fittings, can’t sew worth a lick, and yearns to be an artist, in contrast her older sister Pfiffi, who loves getting new dresses and dreams of being a beautiful bride.

Plus, she’s named Pfiffi. It’s a very tiny-yappy-Pomeranian name.

I’ve always wondered what really girly pink-fluff-and-glitter girls read, because there aren’t many books that I can recall in which girly girls are main character. If they’re in the book at all, they’re a sister or cousin or a friend who acts as either an antagonist or a foil for the heroine - to show what a tomboy she is, because “boyish” is obviously the most flattering adjective that could possible be applied to a girl.

I don’t, I hasten to add, mean to be unduly harsh on my beloved Hattie and the Wild Waves. Pfiffi is never vilified for her more traditional femininity, and her character is necessary to show the gulf between the kind of femininity society expected and the artist Hattie wanted to be. But it is a pattern that shows up time and again, and it is unfair to more traditional feminine girls.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild? They're all girly.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Possibly there's a repository of such books out there that I just never broached? I didn't read Ballet Shoes till I was 20, and at that point the rough prose kept me from appreciating their other qualities. There's a lovely recent movie adaptation, though.

Petrova didn't strike me as all that girly - she hates performing and wants to fly airplanes - but Posie and Pauline are, and IIRC they get as much if not more attention than Petrova.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Oh, for sure, Petrova is the odd one out. I think it's odd you don't find more girly protags in your beloved Victorian novels, though.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

If they were mid-Victorian I probably would. But late-Victorian American novels tend to have heroines in the Jo March mode (although not always; Anne of Green Gables, for instance, loves pretty dresses).