100 Books, #3: Hattie and the Wild Waves
May. 30th, 2012 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerBarbara 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.
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.
