The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  A creative faculty of the mind, imagination is used to think, fantasize, and remember, among other things. The term “imagination” comes from the Latin imaginare, meaning “to picture oneself.” There is a self-reflexive quality to that faculty, and it becomes evident when Francie returns to her childhood home and sees “a little girl sitting on a fire escape with a book in her lap and a bag of candy at hand.” What does Francie do when she sees this “slender little thing of ten” but wave and call out “Hello, Francie.” “My name ain’t Francie . . . and you know it too,” the girl named Florry shouts back. But in vain. Francie is able to picture herself as she was in times past, reading as a ten-year-old, a bag of candy by her side. Through imagination and its power to conjure up images and memories, Francie is able to go back and remember who she once was. The past is always present, and it is reembodied and reenacted by successive generations.

  Cover for the Armed Services edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. North Carolina Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC–Chapel Hill

  The writers who invented Jo March, Anne Shirley, and Francie Nolan were on a social mission to provide fictional role models who care about the world. Recall how deeply care is embedded in the notion of curiosity, and it quickly becomes evident how our curious heroines are not just adventurous rebels but also kind and compassionate. Francie’s longing to become a writer will not be subdued. Even when her Mama tells her brother Neeley that Cornelius John Nolan is “a good name for a surgeon” and does not tell her daughter that Mary Frances Katherine Nolan is a “good name for a writer,” she remains unstoppable. Like the tree that grows in Brooklyn, her passion “lives” and nothing can “destroy” it. In the end, we hear her thoughts about a future as a writer: “She knew God a little better, now. She was sure that He wouldn’t care at all if she started to write again. Well maybe she’d try again someday.”

  Writing and Trauma: Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl

  Alcott, Montgomery, and Smith—all experienced the trauma of war. The Civil War is kept at arm’s length in Little Women, but Alcott herself served as a military nurse and suffered her entire life from the effects of the illness (and the mercury in the medicine used to cure it) contracted while she was on duty. Montgomery wrote the Anne series during World War I, and, in the aftermath of war, her life began to fall apart, with a preacher husband falling into a deep depression for his role in urging young men to enlist and then with the loss of her best friend during the global pandemic of 1919. Betty Smith published A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1943, just two years after the United States declared war on Japan and entered World War II. Her book became one of the Armed Services Editions given to soldiers on their way to war, and Smith evidently received more fan mail from soldiers than from civilians. All three women endured hardships. But two stayed reasonably safe on the home front, while the third suffered hardships to be sure, but not of the magnitude of soldiers and civilians caught in combat zones.

  Around the time that Betty Smith was putting the finishing touches on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Anne Frank, living in comfortable circumstances with her family in the city of Amsterdam, was forced to go into hiding with her parents and sister to avoid arrest and deportation. Dutch forces had surrendered to the Nazis on May 15, 1940, just a day after the bombing of Rotterdam. The Netherlands remained under German occupation until the end of the war. No one who reads Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex is the title Anne gave to the diary entries she wrote while in hiding) can avoid the long shadow cast by the circumstances of Anne Frank’s death: the raid on the secret annex on the morning of August 4, 1944, by a member of the German SS and three members of the Dutch secret police, the interrogations at the Reich Security Offices, the transport to the Westerbork refugee camp, the subsequent deportation to Auschwitz and then on to Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died of typhus.

  We know Anne Frank through the diary entries she wrote, first in a small autograph book bound in red, gray, and tan checkered cloth with a small lock, then in school exercise books. In her first diary entries, dated June 1942, she begins by describing the joys of finding birthday gifts—among other things, a blouse, a game, a puzzle, a jar of cold cream, and roses—then quickly moves on to catty profiles of her classmates, and ends with an inventory of the many restrictions placed on the Dutch Jewish community. This is a book that challenges us to square the banalities of ordinary life with the unthinkable. Less than a month after those initial accounts, on July 8, Anne writes about how “so much has happened it’s as if the whole world had suddenly turned upside down.” The entry for the day ends with the Franks closing the door to the place that had been their home: “The stripped beds, the breakfast things on the table, the pound of meat for the cat in the kitchen—all of these created the impression that we’d left in a hurry. . . . We just wanted to get out of there, to get away and reach our destination in safety. Nothing else mattered.” That safety was vouchsafed the family for two years and a month. Then they were rounded up, more than likely betrayed by a warehouse worker in the Achterhuis, hired after a trusted employee became too ill to continue working.45

  Anne Frank’s diary entries begin with a burst of enthusiasm about the prospect of having a confidante at last. “I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support,” she writes on her birthday, the day on which she discovered the book on a table with her other gifts. At first the diary (later with its imaginary correspondent “Kitty”) becomes the intimate friend whom she was longing to make, unable to find one in her sister, in her mother, or, earlier, in school chums. But with time, Anne Frank begins to see in her writing a mission. On March 29, 1944, she listened to a broadcast featuring Gerrit Bolkestein, Holland’s exiled minister for education, art, and science, in which he urged residents of the country to collect “ordinary documents—a diary, letters . . . simple everyday material” for an archive that would detail the sufferings of civilians during the Nazi occupation.

  Anne began redrafting her diary with an eye to posterity, hoping to provide a picture of what it was like to be in hiding by documenting what her family endured and how they had survived, even though she felt some skepticism about her work ever reaching the public eye. On 324 loose sheets of colored paper, she revised entries even as she continued to provide updates. She dreamed that her diary could someday appear in print, and she had even chosen a title (The Secret Annex) that promised to convey a sense of mystery and intrigue. It was, incidentally, her American publisher who decided, for promotional purposes, to call Anne Frank’s work The Diary of a Young Girl.

  One of Anne Frank’s early loves was Hollywood, and she reverently pasted pictures of movie stars on a wall in her room. But she soon aspired to a different kind of fame, the immortality that could come from making a name for herself through writing. Yet she also clearly understood the value of writing as an expressive outlet. “If I don’t have the talent to write books or newspaper articles,” she declared, “I can always write for myself. . . . I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me!”46 How different from the immortality earned on the battlefield by figures like Achilles. The diary “kept her company and it kept her sane,” Philip Roth noted.47 A self-described chatterbox who spoke her mind, Anne found herself clamming up at times to avoid cutting, judgmental remarks from her elders. The diary gave her a chance to “talk back” with impunity.

  “One of the most compelling figures to emerge from World War II wasn’t a military hero or a world leader,” Katerina Papathanasiou wrote in 2019.48 Anne Frank became almost as well known as the Allied leaders of that war, though few would have thought to refer to her as a heroine, seeing her more as a victim, martyr, or saint. The historian Ian Buruma called her the “Jewish Saint Ursula” and “a Dutch Joan of Arc.”49 Philip Roth saw genius in her writing and referred to her, in The Ghost Writer (his reimagining of Anne Frank’s life), a
s being “like some impassioned little sister of Kafka’s.” But, like so many women writers before her—all of them older if not necessarily wiser—Anne Frank became heroic by using words and stories not just as a therapeutic outlet for herself but also as a public platform for securing justice.

  Anne’s diary entries are full of acts of heroism, small and large. Anne is willing to let the eccentric Mr. Dussel share her room, looking on it as nothing more than one of many willingly made “sacrifices for a good cause.” She worries about those “we can no longer help.” Counting herself lucky to be able to buy food, she complains about the selfishness of those living in the tight quarters of the annex but never about the forced circumstances of the family’s living arrangements. There are rats in the food supply, toilets that malfunction, burglars who threaten the security of the hideaway, the constant sound of gunfire, sirens, and planes, and, from the window of the annex, the sight of people being dragged away by police. And yet, though Anne admits fear, she never allows herself to shut down or to give in to the darkness that surrounds her. The diary reveals how she was able to preserve decency, integrity, and hope, despite living in a regime determined to exterminate her along with the elderly, the ailing, and all those who failed the test of Aryan purity.

  Long classified as “merely” a book assigned to high school students, The Diary of a Young Girl is rarely credited for its literary genius. How many teenagers would have been capable of writing a compelling memoir or of thinking reflectively as Anne Frank did? She writes with the confessional verve of Saint Augustine, exhibits a Du Boisean understanding of double consciousness in describing the out-of-body experience of observing herself, and displays the unforgiving stoic candor of Kafka. Certainly there are many literary prodigies who wrote works that quickly entered the canon, but they are rare. Lord Byron published two volumes of poetry in his teens. Mary Shelley completed Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) when she was eighteen. Arthur Rimbaud wrote almost all his poetry while still a teenager. Daisy Ashford famously wrote The Young Visitors (1919) at age nine. S. E. Hinton published The Outsiders (1968) when she was nineteen. These are the notable exceptions, and most of these authors did not start writing something at age thirteen that would eventually be published.

  According to a 1996 survey that appears on the Anne Frank Museum website, half of U.S. high school students had been assigned The Diary of a Young Girl. Today that number has declined, but readers continue to discover Anne’s voice and how she used her storytelling gifts to document the atrocities of the Nazi era and also to report about the heroism of the helpers who sheltered her family members and kept them alive. But it is, above all, the diary that has kept Anne alive in our imaginations even after the arrests at 263 Prinsengracht, not just, of course, the diary but also the details of Anne’s life in the camps with her sister and mother. It is impossible to read about the Franks at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen without tearing up: Edith starving because she passed on every bit of her rations to her daughters; Anne hauling rocks and digging up sod as part of the pointless labor assignments in the camps; children under fifteen sent directly to the gas chambers; Anne meeting up with former classmates who describe her as bald, emaciated, and shivering; Anne, “delirious, terrible, burning up,” dying most likely in a typhus epidemic.

  In a remarkable volume about Anne Frank’s book, her life, and her afterlife, the American novelist Francine Prose recalls the hours in which she read the diary for the first time as a child, immersed in it until day faded into night. Fifty years later, she reads the diary with her students at Bard College: “And for those few hours during which my students and I talked about her diary, it seemed to me that her spirit—or, in any case, her voice—had been there with us, fully present and utterly alive, audible in yet another slowly darkening room.”50 It’s unlikely that Anne Frank ever really believed that writing would bring her immortality, but the words in her diary turned out to be prophetic: “I want to go on living even after my death.”

  Harriet the Spy Becomes Less Cruel and Scout Discovers Empathy

  Just a decade after Anne Frank’s diary appeared in print in the United States, Louise Fitzhugh published a novel about a girl obsessed with writing in her diary. It seems almost sacrilegious, at the least disrespectful, to invoke Anne Frank’s diary work in the same breath with Harriet M. Welsch’s compulsive writing in Fitzhugh’s 1964 Harriet the Spy. Like an addict, Harriet is forever reaching for her notebook, unable to “go anywhere without it,” scribbling “furiously.”

  What does Harriet write? Certainly nothing that is evidence of precocious genius. Her notebooks are filled with crude adolescent insults, along the lines of “CARRIE ANDREWS IS CONSIDERABLY FATTER THIS YEAR” or “LAURA PETERS IS THINNER AND UGLIER. I THINK SHE COULD USE SOME BRACES ON HER TEETH.” And “PINKY WHITEHEAD WILL NEVER CHANGE. DOES HIS MOTHER HATE HIM? IF I HAD HIM I’D HATE HIM.”51 But Harriet’s entries bear an eerie resemblance to what is recorded on the second day of Anne Frank’s diary: “J. R. . . . is a detestable, sneaky, stuck-up, two faced gossip who thinks she’s so grown up.” Or “Betty Bloemendaal looks kind of poor, and I think she probably is.” “E. S. talks so much it isn’t funny. . . . They say she can’t stand me, but I don’t care, since I don’t like her much either.” Both of these gifted girls find their voices, discovering the value of self-critical reflection and learning about the significance of generosity and kindness.

  “I grew up reading this series of books called ‘Harriet the Spy,’ and I just thought they were the neatest things. . . . I sort of modeled my early life after Harriet the Spy,” Lindsay Moran told a CNN reporter in an interview about her career at the CIA.52 Moran was obsessed with the investigative energy and scriptomania of Harriet M. Welsch, who lives in New York City with her parents. Harriet is obsessed with recording her misanthropic observations, on a daily basis, about the people she observes—the stock boy Joe Curry, the socialite Mrs. Agatha K. Plumber, and the cat owner Harrison Withers, among others. Her ambitious plans to become a writer backfire when classmates find one of her notebooks and read the many vicious pronouncements—savagely cruel in many cases—about how they look and what they say.

  What we might otherwise find admirable in an eleven-year-old protagonist (the ambition to become a writer) becomes a liability in light of the pain and humiliation inflicted on others once Harriet’s notebooks go public. Harriet may not set out to be a bully, but her cutting remarks wound friends and classmates, all young and vulnerable. The novel about her misadventures in espionage has vanished from lists of recommended books for the young drawn up today. But back in 2004, Anita Silvey, an expert on children’s literature, included it in her list of one hundred best books for children, in large part because it was a volume that resonated powerfully with young readers.53 They had no trouble connecting with Harriet’s sense of being a social misfit. And they could not but admire how she managed to find a safe place to compensate for her loneliness—safe only until it was not. Here was a traumatized child (Ole Golly, the woman who is her de facto mother, abruptly quits her position as Harriet’s nanny) who becomes both detective and writer, a loner yet also a snoop who copes with her social isolation through a form of writing that, admittedly, borders on a social pathology. But Harriet finds religion, and it comes in the prosocial form of empathy.

  The philosopher Richard Rorty tells us that some books help us become independent and self-sufficient, and then there are others that help us become less cruel. He divides the latter category into books that enable us to discover the evils of social institutions (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin would be a good example) and those that enable us to see our own failings (Charles Dickens’s Bleak House belongs to that category).54 Harriet the Spy falls squarely into the class of books that help us become less cruel by letting us see the effects of our own actions on others.

  The therapist recruited by Harriet’s parents (we are on the Upper East Side in New York City) to help their daughter work throug
h the trauma of separation from her beloved nanny has some insights into the mind of the young writer in training. Harriet eavesdrops on the telephone conversation between her father and the “Doctor,” catching only fragments of what her father says. “Well, Dr. Wagner, let me ask you this . . . yes, yes, I know she’s a very intelligent child. . . . Yes, well, we’re well aware that she has a lot of curiosity. . . . Yes, a sign of intelligence, yes, quite right. . . . Yes, I think she just might make a writer.”

  The curious child of Fitzhugh’s novel suffers from what could also be diagnosed as a raging case of “incuriosity.”55 In fact, Harriet becomes something of a monster of incuriosity, exhibiting a lack of interest in anything that does not relate to her own personal obsession, and unable to understand the pain she has inflicted on others. To be sure, we can attribute the failure to empathize in part to her age and to the trauma of separation from a mother figure, but her private pursuit of self-fulfillment and autonomy through writing is grounded in cruelty to virtually everyone in her real-life orbit.

  What rescues Harriet from turning into a monster of incuriosity? Undeterred by the social ostracism of her friends and classmates, and even by a letter from Ole Golly urging her to apologize, she continues to write stinging prose: “FRANCA DEI SANTI HAS ONE OF THE DUMBEST FACES YOU COULD EVER HOPE TO SEE. . . . SHE IS ABOUT OUR AGE AND GOES TO A PUBLIC SCHOOL WHERE SHE IS ALWAYS FLUNKING THINGS LIKE SHOP THAT WE DON’T HAVE. . . . SHE DOESN’T HAVE A GOOD TIME AT HOME BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS HOW DUMB SHE IS AND DOESN’T TALK TO HER.”