ajh014.fm Consenting Fictions, Fictions of Consent Levander, Caroline Field, 1964- American Literary History, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2004, pp. 318-328 (Review) Published by Oxford University Press For additional information about this article Access Provided by Western Michigan University at 03/18/11 1:50PM GMT http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/alh/summary/v016/16.2levander.html http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/alh/summary/v016/16.2levander.html DOI: 10.1093/alh/ajh014 American Literary History 16(2), © Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved. Consenting Fictions, Fictions of Consent Caroline Levander Reading is political. As Jane H. Hunter, Gwen Athene Tarbox, and Lois Keith imply, girls’ gction constitutes as well as addresses girls as a distinct audience in order to facilitate the social changes reshaping late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century US culture. Although they diier on the social impact of the girlhood constructed through gction, Hunter’s How Young Ladies Became Girls, Tarbox’s The Clubwomen’s Daughters, and Keith’s Take Up Thy Bed and Walk all assume that if “the process of reading,” as Walt Whitman notes, requires “the reader” of the book as well as its author to “complete” the “text,” the text to be completed in girls’ gction is girlhood itself (424–25). All three books share a concern with girls’ gction and social change, and yet what I gnd intriguing is what all assume but none explore—that is, the larger politi- cal and gnally national signigcance of the girl that girls’ gction helps to constitute. Creating the very girls it presumes, girls’ gction, as Peter Stoneley has recently suggested, teaches both adult and child readers how to invest in girlhood as a way of either accepting or gnding alternatives to consumer culture. The creation of this girl, therefore— whether she seems to facilitate or resist consumerism—is coincident with, and often complicit in, capitalism’s rise. This investment in the idea of the child—in this case the girl— as a pliable, inchoate subject created through collaborative textual engagement informs all three valuable studies and rehects an impor- tant current critical impulse to interrogate rather than assume child identity. Considering what is gained by a collective commitment to the child as “our most convincing essentialism,” to quote Adam Phillips (155), the three books read together oier an extended analy- sis of the social functions that the child identity represented in gction performs in US culture. As Sharon Stephens reminds us, the “‘hard- ening’ of the modern dichotomy of child/adult, like the modern distinction between female/male,” precipitated the emergence of “modern capitalism and the modern nation-state” (6), and gction, as the three books under review make clear, was crucial to this process, if not entirely coterminous with it. A quick tour of the Chicago-based Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability, and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls By Lois Keith Routledge, 2001 The Clubwomen’s Daughters: Collectivist Impulses in Progressive- Era Girl’s Fiction By Gwen Athene Tarbox Garland Publishing, 2000 How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood By Jane H. Hunter Yale University Press, 2002 Creating the very girls it presumes, girls’ gction . . . teaches both adult and child readers how to invest in girlhood as a way of either accepting or gnding alternatives to consumer culture. The creation of this girl, therefore—whether she seems to facilitate or resist consumerism—is coincident with, and often complicit in, capitalism’s rise. ajh014.fm Page 318 Wednesday, March 24, 2004 11:18 AM Derek Day Muse American Literary History 319 American Girl Place, where reading is prominently displayed as cru- cial to constituting the girl identity to which the store then successfully markets, makes clear the ongoing signigcance of girls’ gction and the girls it creates to US consumer culture—and therefore the urgent need for critical commentaries like those produced by the books under review. With its signature image of a girl reading to her doll and the American Girl Magazine that it publishes, American Girl Place uses girls’ gction to encourage the kind of pleasurable con- sumer “absorption” that, as Ann Douglas and Gillian Brown have suggested, distracted nineteenth-century readers of popular gction from the pressing social problems coincident with the “realities of the advancing capitalist economy” (Brown 79). Keith concurs that popular gction for girls brackets the questions of social reform and justice that capitalism makes immediate, while Tarbox and Hunter contend that such gction oiers readers “an increasingly radical view of American girlhood” (Tarbox 5) resulting in “Active Citizenship” (Hunter 382) and, more particularly, in Progressive Era reform (Tar- box 5). However, taken as a whole, these accounts of the genre’s wide-ranging social eiects urge us to consider the larger political function of girls’ gction. Because the emergence of the girls’ novel was itself a response to social pressures facing the nation, these three critical studies collectively suggest the need for an assessment of how the girl identity, created in and through the pages of girls’ gction, in turn grows out of the particular pressures constituting the genre. Whether the girls’ novel taught middle-class girls the “taste” essential to their role as “family possessions” (19), as Hunter illus- trates, or “important lessons regarding self-interest, ambition, and cultural transformation,” as Tarbox suggests (8), the girls it pro- duces are a response to, and index of, the larger social demands that constitute girls’ gction in the grst place. This second half of the story—the sociopolitical context in which girls’ gction develops and its impact on the girls that gction helps to create—is important to the current critical commitment to understanding the child as a political construct. For this reason, I turn, in the grst part of this essay, to a consideration of the social context in which girls’ gction developed as a distinctive form during the time period in which the authors are interested before considering, in the second half of the essay, the possibilities as well as challenges that this larger social framework suggests for our understanding of girls’ gction. 1 While it seems to create the girl anew, the girls’ gction that proliferated over a hundred-year period beginning in the mid nineteenth ajh014.fm Page 319 Wednesday, March 24, 2004 11:18 AM 320 Consenting Fictions, Fictions of Consent century was part of a more extended textual machinery devoted to resolving the particular social and contractual problem that children had represented to the nation since its inception. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke recognizes the particular prob- lem that children, as a class of persons inherently incapable of con- sent, pose to his consensual model of liberal democratic society. Children, according to Locke, “when little, should look upon their parents as their Lords, their absolute Governors” precisely because they are incapable of the unconditional requirement for elective inclusion within the Lockean consensual body politic—“reason” (145). Therefore, even as the American Revolution created a new people who, as Ian Shapiro and others have noted, based their national identity on an abstract Lockean philosophy of universal rights and then used the child as a rich metaphor to justify their break from the “corrupt” parent country of Great Britain, the child remained a latent conceptual threat to the new nation’s successful continuance (Shapiro 279). Locke’s ideas resonated with Americans because he based consideration of human rights and equality upon an appeal to reason rather than upon the constraints of British his- tory. However, Locke’s concern that “the Characters of [the child’s] Mind” are not and cannot be trained to be consistent with the con- sent necessary for civil society registered powerfully with a new nation that required the loyalty of the next generation for its success- ful continuation (206–07). Legal as well as advice manuals considered, and attempted to resolve, the problem that the child potentially posed to the civic order and longevity of the new republic. William Story’s Treatise on the Law of Contracts Not under Seal, for example, cataloged chil- dren generally as “persons incompetent to contract” because of their incapacity to consent (43), but its description of the particular con- ditions under which the child might lawfully enter into a contract reproduces the Lockean requirements of consensual citizenship. Those few contracts that could be initiated before the age of consent—“fourteen years in a male, and twelve in a female” (38)— must be “made voluntarily and freely, and with a knowledge on the part of the infant” about his or her right to choose (35). If late- eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans repeatedly revised their social contracts in an attempt to realize at every level of govern- ance the consent to the larger social contract that the Constitution codiged, the child became a primary site for gauging the success of this national project. Not only were courts increasingly interested in determining as well as directing children’s power of choice, but the popular child-rearing books that proliferated beginning in the 1820s oiered parents advice on how to ensure that their oispring grew up to uphold, rather than undermine, the nation’s ideals. ajh014.fm Page 320 Wednesday, March 24, 2004 11:18 AM American Literary History 321 While the single most important parental duty, according to Benjamin Rush, is raising children “in the principles of liberty and government” (23), books such as Lydia Maria Child’s Mother’s Book (1835), H. W. Bulkeley’s Word to Parents (1858), and Heman Humphrey’s Domestic Education (1840) enjoyed wide sales because they provided parents with helpful strategies for encouraging chil- dren to become not only “free and independent persons” but “good and wise citizens” who would be able, as Francis Grund writes, to carry “their country and their government in their minds” (150). Creating as well as addressing child audiences, much of the gction popular at mid century extended this work of encouraging adults and children alike to align themselves with national interests. Popular gction written in both the North and South during the Civil War, for example, invited child readers to imagine themselves as pro- tagonists in the war—as active participants in upholding national inter- ests, albeit diversely construed, rather than as bystanders in the national struggle. Indeed, as Alice Fahs has recently shown, this gction so eiectively depicted war as “a splendid adventure facilitated by the embryonic national state” that Theodore Roosevelt recalled in his auto- biography the importance of such tales to infusing his Civil War boy- hood with a sense of national purpose (270). Whether or not addressing threats to national integrity explicitly, popular gction tended to feature child protagonists as stand-ins for complicated sets of anxieties about national identity and to thereby encourage what Lauren Berlant has described as a national fantasy of “Infantile Citizenship” (21). Whether aimed at children or not, nineteenth-century gction, therefore, featured children as agents of national interpellation—as powerful vehicles for soliciting readerly consent to ahiation and governance precisely because of their uniquely contested relation to the national body. This solicitation took a distinct shape in the case of girls’ gction, which responded to the social pressures the child posed by making the girl reader into a powerfully hexible social icon. While domestic gction generally worked to construct a privatized female self, degned by her sensibility, interiority, and feelings, as Nancy Armstrong has shown, girls’ gction, in particular, provided one of “the central activi- ties of many privileged Victorian girls’ lives” and an important “vehicle to self-culture” (Hunter 39). This self-culture, of course, was immersed in popular culture, and the importance of girls’ gction to cementing the relation between the two is indicated by the canoniza- tion of the girl reader and her gction. By making the image of a girl reading a powerful trope to which adult and child readers alike were drawn, girls’ gction foregrounded its form as a text available for diverse social uses. Her display at American Girl Place is only one of her more recent appearances; the image of a girl immersed in a book fascinated American artists and writers throughout the nineteenth ajh014.fm Page 321 Wednesday, March 24, 2004 11:18 AM 322 Consenting Fictions, Fictions of Consent century. Winslow Homer’s 1877 watercolor of a girl reading, The New Novel (Fig. 1), for example, visually depicts the girl reader’s power, described by Ralph Waldo Emerson, to produce, wherever she is found, “followers in a few days, and in a fortnight a fashion” (407). This “fashion” of reading that the girl creates is invoked even as it is decried by literary critics such as Douglas, who describes her own early days as a reader of “the ‘Elsie Dinsmore’ books, the ‘Patty’ books, and countless others” (3) before deploying, as a crucial part of her account of the feminization of American culture, the image of “countless young Victorian women [who] spent much of their middle- class girlhoods prostrate on chaise longues with their heads buried in ‘worthless’ novels” (10). But maybe the surest sign of the ongoing star status of the girl reader is the girl reader who literally wrote the book on girls’ gction, Jo March. Even as she is often identiged by pub- lic commentators such as Catharine Stimpson and Carolyn Heilbrun as an important early role model, the fate of Louisa May Alcott’s book- ish protagonist, as Stimpson and Heilbrun also attest, continues to be hotly contested by Little Women fans. Covering the full range of social options that Tarbox, Hunter, and Keith describe, this ongoing conversation among girl readers about the girl reader’s gnal social place—that is, whether Jo should have pursued a life of leisurely ajuence by marrying Laurie, or the career in social outreach mar- riage to Professor Bhaer enables—suggests the current importance of these critical assessments of girls’ gction to understanding the ongoing social legacy of the genre as well as its enduring political eiects. 2 The image of the girl reader carries particularly pronounced political weight in Take Up Thy Bed and Walk, where her physical Fig. 1. Winslow Homer, The New Novel, 1877. Museum of Fine Arts, Springgeld, MA, Horace P. Wright Collection ajh014.fm Page 322 Wednesday, March 24, 2004 11:18 AM American Literary History 323 inactivity reinforces what Keith shows to be a repeated plot in girl’s gction over the last 150 years—a girl’s education through physical paralysis. Teaching readers to understand femininity as psychologi- cally and physically disabling, stories such as Alcott’s Jack and Jill (1880), Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872), and Eleanor Porter’s Pollyanna (1913) repeatedly feature a girl protagonist who has an accident in which she “becomes paralyzed and later, sometimes sev- eral years later, is completely cured” (Keith 23). In their commitment to repeating this story of girlhood illness, these books not only train girls to understand female development as involving a metaphorical paralysis that inevitably produces “passivity, dependence” and a sense of “losing one’s place in the world, being cut oi and separate, no longer a complete human being” (22), but they simultaneously reinforce the idea that disability is a punishment. In so doing, girls’ gction circumscribes the possibility of changing social attitudes toward femininity and disability, even as such gction uses “disabling disease to present social issues to young readers” and teach social responsibility toward the poor and vulnerable (23). The image of the girl reader becomes, in Keith’s analysis, the plight of the disabled person who, in not walking, “symbolizes our worst fears about depend- ency, expressed in Victorian gction as having to ‘lie on the sofa always and be helpless’” (22). Reminiscent of Homer’s and Douglas’s depictions of the girl reader, this girl protagonist becomes the occa- sion for Keith, from her self-identiged position as a former girl reader, current girls’ gction writer, and disabled person, to call for future additions to the canon of girls’ gction that would oier diierent ways of representing both girls and the disabled. The Clubwomen’s Daughters suggests that such revisionist projects were, in fact, well under way as early as the 1880s, born of a political commitment among clubwomen activists such as Susan B. Anthony, Victoria Woodhull, and Mary Church Terrell to train the next generation of women in collectivist feminist politics. Recogniz- ing that the domestic sphere was increasingly disinclined to foster the political conversation and debate that they had enjoyed as girls and that had inspired their adult activism, such activists encouraged others to write girls’ gction that would model female collective action for girl readers. Therefore, the image of the girl reader who is susceptible to the political messages that gction provides, in Tarbox’s analysis, inspires clubwomen to produce a politically progressive alternative to the canon that Keith considers. Perhaps Tarbox’s most important contribution to the subject of girls’ gction is her excavation of an extensive and diverse canon that includes popular but subsequently overlooked texts such as Helen Dawes Brown’s Two College Girls (1886) and Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins’s Four Girls at Cottage City (1898). In its 14th edition within seven years of initial publication, ajh014.fm Page 323 Wednesday, March 24, 2004 11:18 AM 324 Consenting Fictions, Fictions of Consent Two College Girls, as well as much of the Progressive Era girls’ college gction that it inspired, clearly had a signigcant if exclusive following, which Tarbox shows gradually extended beyond the walls of Vassar and Mount Holyoke colleges to include African- American religious organizations and outdoor girls’ organizations. Tarbox suggests that by focusing on “the adventures of the members of liberated girls’ communities” (7), this rich alternative collection of girls’ gction encouraged girls from all backgrounds to resist the concept of passive femininity that she, like Keith, considers to be endemic to more traditional girls’ gction. Indeed, read together, Keith’s and Tarbox’s studies exhibit the wide-ranging diversity of taste among nineteenth-century juvenile readers. The texts that Tar- box analyzes are probably less familiar than the heavily dog-eared pages of the Little Women, Secret Garden, and Elsie Dinsmore books that Keith’s project brings to mind, but, when placed alongside these familiar books, Tarbox’s texts remind us of how important and gnally selective a shared canon is, as John Guillory has observed, in constituting cohesive communities. More persuasive, gnally, than their contention that girls’ behavior seamlessly reproduces the con- tent of girls’ reading are Tarbox’s and Keith’s companion analyses of the diverse and often contradictory range of gctional girl identi- ties available to readers. Therefore, while neither The Clubwomen’s Daughters nor Take Up Thy Bed and Walk takes particularly innova- tive methodological approaches to their subject, their comprehen- sive and careful consideration of an understudied topic furthers the important work of complicating our assumptions about an “essential girl” as well as about the political work she accomplishes. How girls learned to make reading books a priority in the grst place—rather than the content of that reading—is Hunter’s focus in How Young Ladies Became Girls. Featuring “girls as subjects rather than objects, as agents rather than as symbols” (3), Hunter explores the “changing ideas of the female self” occurring over the course of the late nineteenth century (2). As the American middle-class home came to rely increasingly on the work of foreign-born servants and thereby to expand the leisure time of its daughters, girls were encour- aged to pursue activities that developed their, and by extension their family’s, regnement. Hunter gives the example of advice-writer Frances Willard, who, believing that middle-class girls were priced out of the market for domestic labor, encouraged girls to spend their time producing improved versions of themselves as a way to exem- plify family status as well as to defend against potential economic reversals. Reading was crucial to this improvement, and the practice of Jane Addams’s father of paying her for every volume of Plutarch she read represents the extent to which girls’ reading was considered an essential index as well as guarantor of family status. Therefore, ajh014.fm Page 324 Wednesday, March 24, 2004 11:18 AM American Literary History 325 while advice-writer William Thayer proposed at mid century that girls accomplish their goals of self-improvement through reading 100 pages a day, by 1901 advice-writer Heloise Hersey estimated that “the average young gentlewoman reads a novel more than an hour a day. Thus she gives one and one-third years of solid working days to this occupation” (qtd. in Hunter 39). If girls consented to reading as part of a larger commitment to a self-culture that upheld family sta- tus, girls’ reading had the potential to outstrip its purported social purpose. Alice Blackwell, for example, recalls in her diary the repeated attempts that concerned family members made to interrupt her incessant reading with various more menial chores. Therefore, the “elevation of reading to a central and degning aspect of bourgeois girls’ lives” carried with it the possibility that girls would “appropriate reading for themselves” (Hunter 68) to cultivate a “personal taste” and “notion of individuality” (Hunter 87) that did not always coincide with family expectations. If the girls’ novel developed in direct response to a new reading public of leisured girls, girl readers used gction as a vehicle for a “moral and spiritual self-grooming” that could motivate them to gnish their education away from home and in schools, where they assumed leadership roles, often as editors of school papers (Hunter 93). Making reading a priority, therefore, was the grst step in enabling girls to develop a self-culture that at times seemed to contradict its initial purpose, leading Sarah J. Woodward, as editor in chief of the Concord High School Volunteer, for exam- ple, to encourage her female readers to take an active role in public life “instead of sitting in the house reading stories” (Hunter 253). From such evidence, Hunter concludes that the girl reader, even while reinforcing the bourgeois consumer culture this grgure orna- mented, could work to enable the emergence of a New Woman who would challenge many of that culture’s ideals. These multiple politi- cal responses to the self-culture that the girl reader learns played a central role, Hunter concludes, in shaping “the liberal and individual- istic culture of the nineteenth century” (402). 3 However, the self-culture that this girl reader represents not only provided readers with various kinds of political agency within nineteenth-century US culture but organized that culture at a crucial moment in its evolution. In other words, constituting the very self it represents, the self-culture that girls’ gctions disseminated through the image of the girl reader helped to precipitate a broad historical shift away from locating social responsibility in the state and toward locating it in the self. If the child, as we have seen, had historically ajh014.fm Page 325 Wednesday, March 24, 2004 11:18 AM 326 Consenting Fictions, Fictions of Consent both posed and helped to resolve the challenge of soliciting individual consent to national governance, it continued, through the self-culture that the girl reader represents, to facilitate acceptance of major reallo- cations of social responsibility that began to occur in the middle of the nineteenth century. The child, as Marilyn Ivy has observed, plays a crucial role in displacing “the possibilities of politics and commu- nity in late twentieth-century America into the domains of a priva- tized imaginary” (247) that gnally subsumes the possibility of collective social action. But this impulse has its historical origins, as Ian Hacking points out, in the nineteenth century, when the “emerg- ing welfare state” placed increasing attention on the image of the child in order to “radically increas[e] state control over families” (262). Concerned less with “the protection of children” than with the “increase of state power,” federal and state governments used the image of the child to transform mounting social problems facing the nation into signs of personal and familial, rather than civic, failure (Hacking 262). “Beginning in the Victorian era,” the image of the child, therefore, began to serve as a “rhetorical device for diverting attention” away “from society” and onto the self in order to justify a steady decline in social responsibility (Hacking 285). Girls’ gction, I would suggest, facilitated, as well as coincided with, this larger shift toward the social regulation of the self. Indeed, while the girls who do not or cannot read lurk in the margins of girls’ gction—often as objects of outreach for girls who do read— they remain too busy taking over the girl reader’s domestic responsi- bilities to have the resources to transform themselves into girl read- ers. From their position on the sidelines of self-culture, such working-class girls posed an increasing social problem for the state. As reformatory school leader and child advocate Louise Rockford Wardner writes, by way of promoting legislation such as the 1879 Industrial School for Girls Bill, “each unprincipled, impure girl left to grow up” unreformed poisons society as many times as she repro- duces and therefore should be committed early in life to an experi- mental reformatory school (qtd. in Hunter 188), many of which child savers were founding in the late nineteenth century. The same Addams who was rewarded for her girlhood reading, devoted much of her adult life to creating benevolent institutions like Hull House and encouraging literacy among girl tenants in the hopes of preserv- ing the girlhood “innocence,” “tender beauty,” and “ephemeral gai- ety” that she believed working endangered (5). Yet even as books such as Jacob Riis’s Children of the Poor (1892), Edward Townsend’s Daughter of the Tenements (1895), and Franklin H. Briggs’ Boys as They are Made and How to Remake Them (1894) hoped to eiect major reconsiderations of both the individual’s social responsibility and society’s responsibility to its indigent ajh014.fm Page 326 Wednesday, March 24, 2004 11:18 AM American Literary History 327 citizens, the whole culture of social outreach in the US, as prominent late-nineteenth-century child-welfare reformer and Illinois governor John Altgeld observed, was designed not to eradicate but “to intimi- date and control the poor” (Our Penal Machinery 126). In his 1897 address to the Illinois House of Representatives, Altgeld reminds political leaders that it is not the poor but the “greedy and powerful” who have the power to destroy the nation and therefore that “our country” will only fully realize its “great vitality” by “listen[ing] to the voices of the struggling masses” (n. pag.). To the extent that girls’ gction obscured these voices by encouraging a self-culture premised on the leisure the girl reader enjoys, such gction generally helped to sustain the social order that Altgeld critiques, even as such gction may encourage some girl readers to become politically active on behalf of those less fortunate. We need to recognize that, among other things, we are consenting to this set of social practices when we identify with the girl reader—when we debate Jo’s marital choice or visit American Girl Place. We need to understand that girls’ gction constructs not only girls but, through them, the gction of unilateral consent to the social circumstances that allow the work- ing girl to “announce . . . to the world that she is here . . . that she is ready to live, to take her place in the world” (Addams 8)—but leaves her to struggle unaided for sustenance rather than to enjoy the social benegts of self-culture. Works Cited Addams, Jane. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. 1909. Chicago: U of Illinois P,1972. Altgeld, John P. Biennial Message. Journal of the House of Representatives of Illinois. State of Illinois 1897. ———. Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims. Chicago, 1884. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Brown, Gillian. “Child’s Play.” diier- ences 11 (2000): 76–106. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of Amer- ican Culture. New York: Avon, 1978. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 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