A Certain Slant of Light

The problem with reading a book about something you already know way too much about is that you will either love it or you will hate it. Carolyn Carpan's Sisters, Schoolgirls, and Sleuths: Girls' Series Books in America unfortunately fell in the "hate it" category for me, because I disagree with many of Carpan's choices about what to include in this book and also many of the conclusions that she draws.

1. American girls' series is such a broad topic - we're talking literally hundreds of series, many with dozens if not hundreds of books - that it may not be possible to discuss it all in one book, certainly not a book less than 150 pages long.

2. Carpan doesn't seem to realize that there are two kinds of girls' series: single-author girls' series with literary aspirations, like Elsie Dinsmore or the Little Colonel or Betsy-Tacy, and mass-produced girls' series cranked out by ghost writers, like Nancy Drew or Sweet Valley High or the Babysitters Club. She's more interested in the second, and the book probably would have been more successful if she had focused solely on the Stratemeyer syndicate or girls' mystery books, which take up the bulk of the book anyway.

But as it is, the book starts with a chapter on Elsie Dinsmore, which is unfortunate both because Carpan doesn't seem to understand Elsie, and because including Elsie makes it harder to justify excluding (or mentioning only briefly) many other popular and influential single-author girls' series. If you've set yourself up to survey everything then you need to hit EVERYTHING, you know?

3. Carpan asserts that "the compliant Elsie Dinsmore...is the model heroine for the hundreds of other girls' series protagonists that followed her" (7), which is QUITE A STRETCH. The only piece of evidence Carpan offers in support of it is that Nancy Drew, like Elsie, lives in a single-parent household with her indulgent father... except Elsie's father, unlike Nancy's, is so un-indulgent that he forbids Elsie to eat that dangerous luxury jam, so actually I think this is a case where an accidental similarity (single fathers) shows how very different the two series are.

It's possible that Elsie has a successor in some specifically Christian series, but the overarching theme in the Elsie books - the importance of daughters' instant, implicit, cheerful obedience to their fathers, except when the father's commands go against the word of God - is as far as I know sui generis among secular girls' series.

In fact, I can't think of any other girls' series where the parent-child relationship is the most important theme of the story. Even in the Little House books (another series Carpan leaves out entirely!), where Ma and Pa are important characters, Laura's coming of age and her relationship with her sister Mary (and to a lesser extent Carrie) are just as important.

4. Also, insofar as there is one "model heroine for the hundreds of other girls' series protagonists," it's obviously Jo March, because she's the ur-heroine of American girls' books in general and because Little Women is the first book in a series of either three or four books, depending whether you count Little Women and Good Wives separately.

5. Chapters 3 to 8 move chronologically through books from the 1920s to the 1980s. The analysis seems stronger - I got the sense that these are the books Carpan really cares about, not the ones she had to read to try to make her survey complete - but it could also just be that her analysis seems stronger to me because I'm not familiar with most of the books she writes about, so I can't knowledgeably disagree.

6. I SUPER disagreed with a lot of Carpan's choices once she reached the 1990s, not least of which is the fact that somewhere around the sixties and seventies she seems to have narrowed her focus from "books for girls" to "books for teenage girls" without quite seeming to notice. How else could you possibly justify the fact that she devotes one paragraph to the incredibly popular Babysitters Club series?

(Also, she dings BSC because "by promoting babysitting the series may encourage preteen and teen readers to focus on mothering as their primary goal in life" (123), which I think shows a complete failure to actually engage with the series, which is about entrepreneurship and friendship and developing your own individual strengths and talents as much as it is about babysitting, and also shows the shallowness of Carpan's intellectual framework for this book, which might without oversimplification be described as Marriage and Motherhood Bad, Sports and Careers Good.)

But then, Meg Cabot gets only a paragraph as well, and her series are definitely aimed at teenage girls, so who knows what's up with that.

There's also no mention at all of horse series (Heartland and Thoroughbred ought to fall in the teen-girl purview, even if Saddle Club and Pony Pals are too young), only brief mention of magic-themed series - Carpan mentions Cate Tiernan's Sweep but not Daughters of the Moon or Circle of Three - and for some reason a whole section devoted to Goosebumps and Fear Street, which insofar as they were gendered were marketed at boys.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress, A Story of the City Beautiful is surprisingly low on actual details about the Chicago World’s Fair for a book that is set there. This is one of those books where Burnett grabs onto an idea like a terrier and repeats it over and over: in A Lady of Quality it’s Clorinda’s beauteousness (mentioned at least once every three pages. I don’t think I’m exaggerating), while here it’s the idea of the Chicago World’s Fair as fairyland or City Beautiful, which is repeated often to the exclusion of actual detail about the Fair.

On the bright side, the book did help me figure out that the City Beautiful movement was called that as a reference to Pilgrim’s Progress, not just because the organizers thought reversing the normal English order of nouns & adjectives sounded like fun.

I’ve also read Jane Trahey’s Life with Mother Superior, the memoir that inspired The Trouble with Angels. It’s fun! I can see why someone read this book and said, “We’ve got to turn this into a movie.” The movie switches around the order of the incidents, but most of the incidents are drawn from the book - pretty much everything except the scene where the nuns take the girls to a department store to buy bras, and that’s really a better sight gag than it would be in a book.

What I’m Reading Now

The latest American Girl series, set in Hawaii in 1941. Let me begin with my perennial plaint about the lack of illustration in the new American Girl books. Beautiful illustrations have always been central to the appeal of the American Girl series! Why would you set a book in Hawaii, one of the most beautiful places on earth, and not illustrate it???? A travesty.

Otherwise, eh, the story is all right I guess. Not good enough to make up for the lack of illustrations. NEVER LETTING THIS GO.

I’ve also begun Martha Finley’s Elsie at the World’s Fair, which more than makes up for the lack of detail in Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress: Finley clearly swallowed a guidebook whole and then regurgitated it full onto the pages of her novel. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re researching the World’s Fair.

Similarly, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Beyond the Gates is interesting as a nineteenth-century vision of heaven - but I wouldn’t recommend it as reading material today unless you happen to be interested in nineteenth-century American religious beliefs and/or spiritualism.

What I Plan to Read Next

My November reading challenge is “a memoir, biography, or book of creative nonfiction,” and lo, A Secret Sisterhood came through with a recommendation: Vera Brittain’s Testament of Friendship, a memoir about her friendship with fellow author Winifred Holt. It’s perfect! I love memoirs of literary friendships.

A few memes ago, ladyherenya asked me which characters I wanted to save from their narratives, a question that it took me basically forever to answer because I kept getting distracted and writing BASICALLY AN ESSAY about Elsie Dinsmore. So I decided that I should share, because when I read this book for my nineteenth-century girls' literature project it basically exploded my brain.

Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore books are a series about an evangelical Protestant girl, first written in the 1870s. They basically focus on her relationship with her terrible, terrible father, who is simultaneously antagonist and hero, which is screamingly painful.

So Elsie’s mom died soon after Elsie was born, and in his grief Elsie’s father (who incidentally was super young and hot, the book informs us repeatedly) ran away to Europe and didn’t see his daughter till his return when she was eight. Eight-year-old Elsie, as Finley likes to remind us, is “not yet perfect,” because she does terrible things like allowing “her friend to accuse her [Elsie’s] father of cruelty and injustice without offering any remonstrance.”

You know, because he does little things like give her bread and water for lunch, and then, when she’s crying too hard to eat it, force her to choke it down because he thinks she’s refusing to eat out of stubbornness. Not cruel or unjust at all, am I right?

Poor abused Elsie spends the first few books yearning hopelessly for her father’s love, which he keeps withdrawing whenever she disobeys him. In Mr. Dinsmore’s mind, anything less than cheerful and instantaneous submission to his will is disobedience, so even saintly and self-effacing Elsie can’t please him.

And that’s before he asks her to flout her Calvinist convictions. Not, you know, because he doesn’t know about her convictions, but because he thinks that her convictions are ridiclous and wants to break them once and for all. So he gets sick, and he takes the opportunity to be all, "Elsie, I know it's the Sabbath, but you should read me this secular book."

Elsie refuses! Mr. Dinsmore is so vexed by her disobedience that he almost dies. Elsie’s hitherto kindly aunt tells her, “we all know that it is nothing but your misconduct that has caused this relapse.” Go ahead, Aunt Adelaide, twist that knife.

But then! But then! He gets better! NOOOOO. And Mr. Dinsmore is SUPER MAD. His daughter disobeyed him, and clearly the only proper response to this is SHUNNING. He tells her, “Elsie, I expect from my daughter entire, unquestioning obedience, and until you are ready to render it, I shall cease to treat you as my child. I shall banish you from my presence, and my affections.”

Elsie of course feels no anger about that. She tells him, “I know you have a right to do it, papa; I know I belong to you, and you have a right to do as you will with me, and I will try to submit without murmuring, but I cannot help feeling sad.”

(Is this the proper time to comment on the creepy incestuous vibes from their relationship? Lest you think this is my twenty-first century perversity talking, no, the other characters comment on it too: “Really, if a body didn’t know your relationship, he or she might almost imagine you a pair of lovers,” Elsie’s Aunt Enna scoffs.

And in a later book, after Elsie almost got engaged to a vile speculator Elsie’s father is all “DID HE KISS YOU?” Elsie assures her father that he did not, and Elsie’s father reacts thus: “ ‘I am truly thankful for that!’ he exclaimed in a tone of relief; ‘to know that he had – that these sweet lips had been polluted by contact with his – would be worse to me than the loss of half my fortune.’ And lifting her face as he spoke, he pressed his own to them again and again.”

People in the nineteenth century had different standards about physical contact than we do, but I am pretty sure that a father basically making out with his daughter was never okay.)

BUT BACK TO THE SHUNNING. Elsie’s father shuns her for six months. He convinces most of the extended family to shun her too. He takes away her nanny, who is basically her mother figure. Elsie begins to pine away and die. He builds a giant plantation house that they can live in together, if only Elsie will give up on her whole wicked “having a conscience” thing and apologize, and tells her that “all your friends will soon cease to love you, if you continue to show such a willful temper.”

Because apparently Mr. Dinsmore’s main goal in life is to destroy the last ragged shreds of Elsie’s self-esteem. The narrative is forever noting Elsie’s self-loathing with great approval: “I don’t deserve that he should love me or be kind and indulgent, when I am so rebellious,” she tells herself sorrowfully.

(This is, incidentally, the part of the book where Elsie begins to fantasize about dying. “I am afraid it isn’t right, but sometimes I am so sad and weary that I cannot help longing very much to die, and go to be with her [mother] and with Jesus; for they would always love me, and I should never be lonely any more,” she says wistfully.)

But despite her self-hatred, Elsie refuses to apologize! Her father, baffled and infuriated, is all, "If you don't obey me I will send you to a CONVENT SCHOOL." Elsie has been raised on terrible stories about wicked Papists torturing Protestants, and therefore promptly falls into a fatal decline, which so alarms her father that he comes to see her. Elsie, who is delirious, sees him and is like, “IT IS THE INQUISITOR AAAAAAH.”

I cannot disagree with you there, Elsie.

And then Elsie dies! Except not really, because there are going to be twenty-something more books about her. But her father thinks she dies, and is Saved, and then he never asks her to go against her conscience again, and they live together happily ever after despite the fact that he is a terrible, terrible man.

And these books have been recently reprinted. What is this I don’t even WHAT WERE THEY THINKING.