Where Has Jane Eyre Gone?
DALFONZO, GINA R.
Where Has Jane Eyre Gone? In praise of girls' books BY GINA R. DALFONZO Of all the dreary demystifi-cations of female experience advanced by feminists, surely one of the silliest is the claim...
...Alcott's books show why she and other girls' writers of her day were entirely at home with strong female characters...
...And in the 1980s, two hugely popular television movies familiarized an even wider audience with Anne's escapades—falling off a roof, accidentally dyeing her hair green, breaking her slate over the head of a teasing boy, and so on...
...Her notion about princesses (whether or not Burnett intended it) reflects the Biblical concept, second nature to nineteenth-century readers, that the greatest of all is the person who serves others...
...But Anne's appeal goes beyond the funny scrapes she gets into...
...Till this moment I never knew myself...
...The real problem is not in Jo, but in the distorted vision of her modern critics...
...Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, another tale of an imaginative orphan, don't have to attend self-esteem classes and empowerment seminars to learn how a confident female behaves...
...Much of Jane's fierce strength as an adult is traced directly to Helen's influence...
...The March sisters have their flaws, but each also has what today would be called a strong sense of self and a refreshing lack of the anxieties that we now take to be a normal part of adolescence...
...Its heroine, Anne Shirley, is "feminine to the core" ("I'd rather be pretty than clever," she confesses to her best friend, Diana), but she is ultimately remembered for her intelligence, creativity, and thoughtful-ness...
...A former professor of English at Vassar and Manhattanville, O'Keefe would persuade us that "many girls were damaged by characters, plots, and themes in the books they read and loved," because in these books "female virtue" is invariably bound up with "sit-still, look-good messages...
...Jane, the creation of a woman who remembered what it was like to be a helpless little girl in a brutal world, is indignant at the cruel treatment meted out by her aunt and teachers...
...The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself," the adult Jane vows when facing the greatest temptation of her life...
...Deborah O'Keefe notwithstanding, young women should be encouraged to do what many of them already are doing: read the classic girls' stories and great novels...
...She is a nineteenth-century girl who talks slang...
...The social system that formed and sustained these heroines invariably included religious faith, a solid family structure, and a clear code of ethics...
...Jo plainly defies the contemporary feminist caricature of the past as a time when prim and proper heroines were all the rage...
...Yet that is the thesis of Deborah O'Keefe's Good Girl Messages: How Young Women We^e Misled by Their Favorite Books...
...Yet during the picnic at the end of Little Women, it's obvious that Jo, now a wife, mother, and headmistress of the boys' school she and her husband have founded, is as buoyant as ever: "Jo was in her element that day, and rushed about, with her gown pinned up, and her hat anywhere but on her head, and her baby tucked under her arm, ready for any lively adventure which might turn up...
...Sara's imaginary royalty gives definition to her private sense of who she is: one held to a very high standard...
...But her boarding school friend Helen teaches ten-year-old Jane about forgiveness and self-control...
...Think what soldiers bear...
...Yet it would be hard for parents to provide their daughters a better model of generosity and resourcefulness than Sara Crewe...
...But if she praises the teenage Jo for her spirit, O'Keefe also accuses her of "copping out" by eventually outgrowing her wild ways...
...Although Anne's love of big words and elegant phrases means that these books aren't always easy read-ing—"Henceforth I shall cover the past with the mantle of oblivion," she announces at one point—girls still devour them...
...And he would never say a word—not one word...
...It makes Sara so attractive that her story has never gone out of print...
...But of all the exemplars of the feminine ethos before modern feminism, perhaps the finest is Elizabeth Bennet, heroine of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813...
...For classic literary heroines and for the girls nurtured on their stories, the great goal was to "know themselves" honestly and thus to grow into mature women...
...The central figure in A Little Princess (1905) by the English-born American writer Frances Hodgson Burnett, best known for The Secret Garden (1911), Sara endures hardship, including her beloved father's death and her resulting poverty, in a way that has inspired girls for a century...
...Realizing that she has misjudged and hurt the seemingly arrogant Darcy, while allowing herself to be deceived by the handsome but corrupt Wickham, Elizabeth exclaims, "How despicably have I acted...
...They ignore the vital connection between Jo's strength and her parents' careful teaching, which many dismiss as "foolish moralizing" and "historical baggage," in the words of novelist Bobbie Ann Mason...
...I will keep the law given by God...
...Even in 2001, a girl trying to maneuver in the cutthroat world of junior high and high school might be fortified by the example of a heroine who is sweet enough to make friends without acting phony, and strong enough to stand up to peer pressure...
...If there was a war he would have to bear marching and thirstiness and, perhaps, deep wounds...
...They inhabit a world that pressures them to look and act like twentysomethings while teaching them nothing about the responsibilities of adulthood...
...And unlike her closest friend, Elizabeth refuses (twice) to marry merely for security...
...Polly confides to her diary, "I used to envy Fanny, but I don't now, for her father and mother don't take care of her as mine do of me...
...Jo March has her wise parents' help in learning to channel her high spirits and bearing the death of her favorite sister...
...In the book's most moving scene, Sara uses a coin she has found to buy six buns, then gives five of them to a beggar girl who is even hungrier than she is: [Sara] was talking to herself, though she was sick at heart...
...With the help of a few friends and a vivid imagination, she creates an inner life as a "princess" that helps her endure the worst circumstances with dignity...
...Indeed, O'Keefe does her readers a favor by sending us scurrying to our shelves to pore through half-forgotten, well-loved stories and confirm that, sure enough, the exact opposite is true: The great girls' books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (many of them further popularized in film, television, and stage versions) are filled with active, vibrant young women notable for their moral strength...
...Polly's independence and high standards show up even more clearly than those of the March girls, because Alcott sketches her against the backdrop of a superficial society...
...But without adults helping them gain a "moral understanding of our nature [and] our responsibilities," as psychiatrist Robert Coles puts it, how can they gain true maturity...
...Predictably, by the time Fanny reaches her early twenties, she is "dead sick of parties and flirtations . . . and going the same round year after year, like a squirrel in a cage," but she is so used to these things that she doesn't know how to look for anything better...
...This particular girl wasted little time agonizing over the cruelties of the opposite sex...
...Girls raised on books like A Little Princess and L.M...
...I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit...
...and Carol Ryrie Brink's Caddie Woodlawn (1935), a pioneer tomboy who manages to prevent a battle between settlers and Indians...
...And the girls themselves, despite their occasional fights, look out for each other and encourage each other: "The two older girls were a great deal to one another, but each took one of the younger sisters into her keeping and watched over her in her own way...
...just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,—as we are...
...and, according to her sister Amy, "never will behave like a young lady...
...Gina R. Dalfonzo is managing editor of the Family Research Council's teen website and coauthor of Home Remedies: Reading Lists and Curriculum Aids to Promote Your Child's Educational Well-Being...
...Like Anne Shirley, the witty Elizabeth is still so popular that the 1996 television version was among the highest-rated miniseries and remains a top-selling video...
...In Little Women, it's clear what keeps New England sisters Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March going despite poverty, hard work, and their father's absence in the Civil War...
...Arguing from supposedly stereotypical literary scenes—depictions of mothers making their daughters feel safe and loved, for example—along with ominous anecdotes attempting to show how the women of her own generation are passive and pliant, O'Keefe insists that until about 1950, a vast literary conspiracy was trying to suck the brains and spirit out of little girls...
...Any list would have to include Johanna Spyri's fearless Swiss mountain girl Heidi (1880...
...The heroines they created could be independent without losing or disguising their femininity—Anne Shirley glories in pretty dresses, even as she fights tooth and nail to earn the highest grades in her class—because their culture prized, and was designed to instill, both femininity and character...
...Fanny and her schoolmates consider themselves adults already, and Fanny tells Polly she dresses "like a little girl...
...To revisit the girls' classics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, actually, is to enter a heroines' hall of fame...
...Yet the climax of the book comes only when she is forced to recognize her own fallibility...
...This doesn't stop O'Keefe from disparaging characters like "brave but passive" Sara Crewe...
...Their mother provides firm and loving guidance—limiting the amount of time seventeen-year-old Meg spends with an admirer, giving the girls Bibles as gifts, encouraging them to donate their Christmas breakfast to poor neighbors, and teaching Jo to control her hot temper...
...Letters from their father remind them of his love for them and confidence in them...
...Other equally spirited, morally serious pre-feminist heroines have survived the test of time...
...Montgomery heroine and an aspiring writer...
...Visiting her friend Fanny Shaw in the city, fourteen-year-old Polly finds herself in the middle of a wealthy but discontented family, with a weak, selfish mother and a father who is "so busy getting rich that he had not found time to teach his children to love him...
...This kind of stoicism is bad, O'Keefe explains, because eleven-year-old Sara doesn't escape her awful situation on her own, but merely suffers until a heroic male, her father's old friend, rescues her...
...loves to run, ride, skate, and write stories...
...These books and many others like them suggest that, contrary to O'Keefe's theory, girls' authors before 1950 were far more concerned with encouraging girls and young women to develop their minds and learn self-reliance than with teaching them to sit around and look pretty...
...In portraying young women shaped by moral influences, these books were following a pattern set by earlier literary classics—classics that themselves have always attracted young readers...
...When she thinks she will be forced to leave Mr...
...Their parents and teachers and all the other adults in their lives, meanwhile, should wake up to the vital importance of reinforcing the lessons in femininity and character that these old books are now almost alone in teaching...
...In Anne of Avonlea (1909), her friend and future suitor Gilbert—by now recovered from the slate incident—reflects on what makes her so attractive: Anne's greatest charm was the fact that she never stooped to the petty practices of so many of the Avonlea girls—the small jealousies, the little deceits and rivalries, the palpable bids for favor...
...So does Polly Milton in Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), a book that foreshadows the situation girls would face at the end of the twentieth century...
...These novels celebrate character in girls and women in a way that their contemporary counterparts, filled with characters brooding over nasty boys and weight problems, seldom do...
...Even O'Keefe is compelled to recognize that Little Women is not only a great read, but also a wonderful tool for helping girls develop inner strength and confidence...
...Today, teenage girls (and, for that matter, boys) are taught that nearly anything they want to do is right and will "empower" them...
...Emily of New Moon (1923), another L.M...
...If I'm a princess," she was saying, "If I'm a princess—when they were poor and driven from their thrones—they always shared—with the populace— if they met one poorer and hungrier than themselves...
...Elizabeth is amused by an overheard insult from a handsome and wealthy stranger—a remark that would wilt Bridget Jones, flighty British heroine of the 1996 transatlantic bestseller who is supposed to be her modern-day counterpart...
...Rochester, the wealthy employer whom she loves, Jane confronts him with an argument based on her deep religious convictions: Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless...
...What is impressive about this contention is the boldness of its inversion of reality...
...Raised by loving parents who have encouraged her studies, her musical talent, and her physical activities, Polly feels no interest in the "maneuvers, heart burnings, displays of vanity, affectation, and nonsense" rampant among these girls...
...But Polly finds little to admire in the other girls' obsession with clothes, college boys, and gossip, or their disrespect for their elders...
...You have to bear things," Sara explains to a friend early in the story, when her father has left her at boarding school...
...Besides, isn't there something sinister, O'Keefe insinuates, about this "father-worship...
...I, who have prided myself on my discernment...
...One such is Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), about a young woman who is fortified for the trials life brings her by the inspiring example of a devout childhood friend...
...Thus, Sara Crewe has the memory of her father's love and the "moral imagination" to survive poverty and injustice...
...sanctioned by man...
...In praise of girls' books BY GINA R. DALFONZO Of all the dreary demystifi-cations of female experience advanced by feminists, surely one of the silliest is the claim that the heroines of girls' classics helped turn generations of admiring readers into milksops...
...Papa is a soldier...
...And it was Alcott, one of America's early feminists, who showed most clearly how religious faith and family ties helped young women achieve character— again, in direct opposition to modern feminists, who argue that such "patriarchal" influences actually stifle girls...
...Anything of the sort was utterly foreign to her transparent, impulsive nature...
...Laura Ingalls Wilder, who recalled her childhood days on the prairie in the Little House books (1932-43...
...Jo learns a good deal about patience, tact, and maturity in general, but, as this scene demonstrates, she never loses her "jolly" ways...
...Jane's self-respect depends not on gratifying her desires, but on something greater...
...It falls to cheerful, sensible Polly, now supporting herself by giving music lessons, to help Fanny find something worthwhile to do with her life...
...The first in an eight-volume series, Anne of Green Gables (1908) is set on Prince Edward Island in Canada...
...Few writers have stressed character more than Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women (1868) and numerous other bestsellers...
Vol. 6 • June 2001 • No. 39
