There is another unusually dark story I remember from my school comic days, not a Silent Three story, and sadly I can’t recall enough to track it down and re-read it, but it stays with me and speaks to me of this time in my life, because it was a story of isolation. A girl who had always had private tuition started at a boarding school. She was a beanpole, and her stern, old-fashioned mother had strong ideas about what a schoolgirl should wear, and insisted she should put up her hair in severe plaits and wear a long shapeless tunic. The drawing was witch-like, horrific. Immediately the girl was labelled a frump, teased mercilessly and the victim of practical jokes. Nobody liked her, she was all alone.
I’m not sure I’d ever heard the word frump before and I didn’t know anything about fashion (although I did have a feeling the clothes the other girls were wearing weren’t contemporary anyway, it was quite an ancient back number) but I developed a horror of the word and what it might mean. It didn’t help that I was tall and awkward and gangly, had just been pre-scribed ugly glasses I tried to wear as little as possible, was often teased, and found it impossible to make friends. Was this me, was this my fate? I can’t remember how this was all resolved, did Frump Girl have a dramatic makeover or just do something that made the other girls like her? All I recall is the chasm that opened up under me when I read the word frump. Again, this was not a sexualised world: it was all to do with the peer group and the helplessness when every girl around you is a mean girl.
But I wasn’t being bullied, I wasn’t surrounded by mean girls. And somehow that was worse: it felt as if I had brought this isolation on myself. The only way out was temporary respite. So when I sat in the classroom during break with the rain teeming down outside, I was in a safe place. I was spared the ordeal of standing alone in the playground, and I wasn’t expected to talk to anyone because I was sipping my milk and reading comics. I never talked to the other girls about the stories we read, so I have no idea if they shared my fondness for the Silent Three. But it was the perfect world in which to immerse myself. I had a choice of characters with whom I could identify and I expect I took it in turns. First was the damsel in distress with the pale face and the trembling voice – well, that was obviously me. How wonderful to find three girls who would instantly understand, sympathise and vow to help me! Then if I was feeling a bit more daring, I’d have a shot at being Joan, who seemed the most junior of the three. Then I might work my way up to Peggy, and finally the pinnacle of prowess: I’d be Betty, the rebel, the athlete, the solver of baffling riddles, the charismatic leader, everything I wasn’t, with her outflung arm and her dramatic accusations and declarations: ‘If someone is a victim of an injustice – then the Silent Three will strike!’
“it was the perfect world in which to immerse myself. I had a choice of characters with whom I could identify”
So here at last is a hypothesis I can state with complete confidence: I needed heroes. Preferably girls, though I’d settle for a boy or an animal. Pooh is a humble hero; Alice is a brave and enterprising hero; the Blyton kids are adventurous heroes, though I wish the girls were braver; and the Moomins were plucky creatures who laughed in the face of thunderstorms. But the Silent Three were my champions.
“So here at last is a hypothesis I can state with complete confidence: I needed heroes.”
Oh Betty Roland, my hero. If only you knew what you did for me, how you took my side and fought for me, the victim of injustice, as I saw things, and how you finally allowed me the ultimate privilege of taking your place. No longer the Silent One, but the leader of the indomitable Silent Three.
GENIUS BURNS
Little Women
by Louisa May Alcott
The only thing I remember about Little Women with any clarity is that I hated it. I wasn’t just indifferent, or unen-gaged. The book aroused me to anger, and I’m not even sure I finished it, which for a dutiful dogged reader like me was very unusual. You might wonder why, when there are so many books I loved as a child clamouring for attention, I choose to write about a book I hated. I’m curious to discover what it was that so riled me, and I have a nagging feeling of guilt that perhaps I was wrong and should make amends. And what do I mean anyway? Can I be right or wrong about a book?
“The only thing I remember about Little Women with any clarity is that I hated it.”
When I try to remember what it was I hated, it comes down to petty things. Little Women, I thought in my literal way, was a silly title. The three March sisters – Jo, Beth and Amy–were definitely girls, not women, little or otherwise. Actually they never seemed like girls to me, or at least not like myself or the girls I knew. There was always something precocious and self-dramatising about them that put them in the teenager bracket. Teenage girls, in the books and comics I read, were vapid and frivolous older sisters who fussed about hair, make-up and boys, and exploded in temper tantrums at the sensible younger sister who dared to express a sceptical opinion. Not that the March girls were like that, exactly – how could they be, living in a time before teenagers were invented? – but they just weren’t sensible, like us. And their mother had a silly name. Marmee. I ask you. How twee can you get? It even rhymes with smarmy. I winced whenever I read it.
“I have a nagging feeling of guilt that perhaps I was wrong and should make amends.”
Every budding young writer is expected to identify with the girl I remembered as Beth, the writer in the family, but I didn’t, even though at the time I was budding all over the place – filling notebooks with half-completed stories and drawing comics that always ended with the words ‘More next week’ (there never was any more, I just lost patience or ran out of ideas). I found that industrious little writer prissy and annoying, particularly when unlike me she seemed capable of actually finishing what she wrote, and I really didn’t want her to get anywhere with her writing. I was furiously jealous of her, in fact. She felt like a rival I had to defeat.
“I was furiously jealous of her, in fact. She felt like a rival I had to defeat.”
And then there were boyfriends. Ugh. By the time I was thirteen and hormones and peer group pressure were at work, I was very keen to read about romance and sex, but the years seven to eleven were a time when most boys in stories were courteous brotherly figures (boys in real life were usually loud and revolting), sex in stories was unthinkable, and romance in stories was soppy and should be treated with disdain, though I loved Cupid and Pisk, and was magnanimously prepared to allow for princely kisses and happy ever after at the end of fairytales. I have buried the details but there was a boy called Laurie in Little Women who set my teeth on edge. He was courting one of the girls, I don’t remember which one, and I just wished he would butt out.
All this hate bubbled up out of disappointment and resentment, because I was acutely conscious that I was supposed to love Little Women. It was A Classic of Children’s Literature and it was that rarity, A Book for Girls. No doubt somebody gave the book to me: I always regarded books that were presents I hadn’t already requested with a mix of joy and wariness. There was the terrible example of another gift, another old-time Classic for Girls, What Katy Did, by Susan Coolidge. Katy was a mildly rambunctious girl who shocked everyone with her mildly wild behaviour, and then halfway through the book she had a shocking accident on a swing and became a paraplegic. That didn’t bother me at all, but what did bother me was that she became amazingly quiet and good, and everyone loved her. To take an example from a book I read a few years later, it was like Scarlett O’Hara turning into Melanie Hamilton, and it was hideous to behold. And I was supposed to like this story?
“All this hate bubbled up out of disappointment and resentment, because I was acutely conscious that I was supposed to love Little Women.”
I don’t know if Little Women does that kind of heavy-handed moralising, but I should stop speculating on what is wrong with it: I just don’t remember enough. Only my indignation.
My re-reading copy, which I’ve borrowed from a friend (it seems to be a book man
y women friends have), is the Penguin Classics edition from 1989, edited with an introduction by Elaine Showalter, notes by Siobhan Kilfeather and Vinca Showalter, and notes for further reading. There were originally two books: Little Women, published in 1868, and its sequel Good Wives, which came out the following year; in most modern editions, they are combined under the one title. As usual, I decide to read the book first and the introduction and notes afterwards. The cover is an illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith from a 1923 edition, and my hackles rise: it shows a young woman reading to three girls, and its charm is frankly chocolate-boxy. But hey, mustn’t let a picture put me off.
Very soon I discover that I’ve remembered this book very badly indeed. There are four, not three, March sisters: I’d forgotten about Meg, the eldest, who at the time the story commences is sixteen; Jo is fifteen, Beth thirteen, and Amy twelve, so at least I was right about the fact they are teenagers (or in Amy’s case, a near-teenager). But what disturbs me most about my unreliable memory is that it’s Jo, not Beth, who is the book-worm and budding writer, and she’s not the least bit prissy. More of her later.
“I discover that I’ve remembered this book very badly indeed.”
It’s an all-female household: Mr March is away in the army (it’s the time of the Civil War, though we hear very little about that) and Mrs March is taking care of the family herself, with the help of loyal servant Hannah, who speaks in loyal servantese (‘Some poor creeter come a-beggin’’). Their domestic set-up is described in great detail, and if you’re insatiably curious about the way a genteel family somewhat down on their luck lived in a New England town at this time, you will be well rewarded. Not that they are really poor: that role is fulfilled by the Hummels, a gaggle of sickly little German children for whom the March family do good deeds. No, the Marches are just deprived of the finer things of life (‘Mr March lost his property in trying to help an unfortunate friend’ is all the explanation we’re given) which means that Meg moans a bit about having to work as a governess, and Jo moans a bit about having to work as a companion to her strict Aunt March, and from time to time in the story all the sisters except Beth will envy girls with smarter gowns and flashier houses and rosier prospects.
But of course there are other finer things of life that money can’t buy, and Christopher Columbus, as Jo would exclaim, doesn’t Alcott make sure we know it. This is how I discover what I really hated about Little Women. I don’t hate it now: indeed I have some respect for a truly monumental book (491 pages in this edition) that illuminates the lives of four young women in small-town 1860s and ’70s America, from their teens to their thirties. That’s no small feat, and it’s also infinitely better written than The Castle of Adventure, say. But I can’t warm to it, although it’s trying very hard to please me. Too hard, perhaps. At one point I write in my notes ‘I feel out of sympathy with this book’ and after that, though I persist doggedly to the end, I never change my mind.
“At one point I write in my notes ‘I feel out of sympathy with this book’ and after that, though I persist doggedly to the end, I never change my mind.”
What’s the problem? Moralising. It starts on the first page and it never stops. These girls are obsessed with trying to be good, but when they are good, nothing annoys me more. Mrs March is portrayed as a kind of household saint, dearly beloved, forever gently urging her girls to Do The Right Thing (her only weakness is a temper which she never actually permits herself to show), and when the instructions are not coming from her, they are coming from one of the other characters, or from the author, or on one occasion from an illuminated book that Amy opens to the fortuitous words ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’. I grit my teeth.
“These girls are obsessed with trying to be good, but when they are good, nothing annoys me more.”
At least Meg, Jo and Amy have a few faults to wrestle with, that make them more lively and interesting; but Beth is that ghastly and wholly unbelievable creature, a good little girl. The moment I read that she spends her time caring for her sick dolls, I despair. What anathema she must have been to me as a child, when I happily sent my dolls on dangerous adventures and ripped off their heads and limbs in battle. Beth is humble and sweet and a bit sickly and obviously destined to die young, and for me her death can’t come fast enough. I have great hopes halfway through the book when she contracts scarlet fever, and we spend several agonising pages hovering over her bed of pain, but darn it, she pulls through, and we have to wait hundreds of pages for the slow decline from some unexplained but not particularly ravaging fatal illness, and the gentle leave-taking, and the slipping away, and the sorrow, and my relief. And it was the same the first time round. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s comment on another famous literary passing: ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.’
And yet I had a tender heart and ready tears. How I wept over the deaths of Blinky Bill’s dad, and Aslan the lion god. How I sobbed over yet another famous deathbed scene, the farewell of thirteen-year-old Judy in Ethel Turner’s 1893 novel Seven Little Australians. This was a shock, because Judy was the wild child, the ragamuffin, easily the most alive person in the book: I could not conceive of her not breathing and laughing and speaking mock-Irish and slashing at the grass with a scythe. She got very sick, and she recovered. But then her back was broken, literally by a blow out of the blue: a tree fell, and it hit her as she rushed to save her youngest brother. Turner shamelessly pulls out all the stops for the ensuing scene: ‘Killed Judy, to slow music,’ she commented. Read it again: you’ll wallow in it, it’s wonderfully over the top and it breaks your heart. But no, I could not spare one tear for Beth, perhaps because to me she was never quite alive in the first place.
“I could not spare one tear for Beth, perhaps because to me she was never quite alive in the first place.”
Let’s face it, Alcott’s moralising and her examples of ‘good people’ bring out the bitch in me. It’s not that she is telling us anything I disagree with – aren’t we all against envy and snobbery and materialism, and don’t we all want to value what we have instead of pining after what we can’t have, and isn’t love what matters most, and shouldn’t we strive to be kind to all, and especially to those we love? It’s just the way Alcott keeps on hitting us over the head with her big fluffy baton. And yes, now I think about it, sometimes I do disagree with the moral itself, especially the pre-feminist homilies to keep the little woman in her place. When Meg grows up, marries and has babies, she becomes so preoccupied with her children that she neglects her husband, and her mother has to remind her of her wifely duties, and try as I might, and for all the allowances I can make for 1860s thinking, I just can’t accept the chapter’s conclusion: ‘a woman’s happiest kingdom is home, her highest honor the art of ruling it – not as a queen, but as a wise wife and mother.’ It might suit Moominmamma, but what sort of advice is that for today’s young girls?
“Alcott’s moralising and her examples of ‘good people’ bring out the bitch in me.”
I read Little Women once in my childhood, once as a teenager, and once as a young adult. As a teenager I realised the edition I had read as a child was heavily edited so that Beth survives, and it came as a great shock when she didn’t. I felt cheated, not because she died but because I was robbed of the pathos of the tragedy. This is why they should never censor classics for children.
In my twenties I read the sequel where Meg has a meltdown because her jams didn’t set. I felt the same way Simone de Beauvoir did about Good Wives. She was so enraged she hurled the book across the room. This is why both books should never be sold as one edition – you’d chuck out the baby with the jammy bathwater!
Alice Pung
I must be fair. It was a moralistic age, and compared to many moralists of her day, Alcott is gentle and tolerant; indeed, she satirises the more solemn preachers. She believes in a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. The trouble is that the sugar is sometimes as bad as the medicine. Littl
e Women is full of people playing pranks and having fun – sometimes quite mischievous fun, in an innocent sort of way – but what lumbering pranks they are, either exhaustively explained or hinted at in a heavy nudge-wink way. The nadir for me is a chapter on the Pickwick Club, where the girls hold meetings and produce a newspaper in homage to Dickens’s characters. Very spirited, very creative, and the whimsy is so thick I’m choking on it.
What about Laurie? He is both much less and much more than a boyfriend, and I like him better the second time round. He’s the boy next door: handsome, charming, indolent, teasing, somewhat lonely, and rich. When he and the girls first get together, he is nearly sixteen, Meg is sixteen and Jo is fifteen, and it appears that Laurie is the only boy they know. If this were modern young adult fiction there would be sexual tension, resolved or unresolved, all over the shop. But where are the hormones? Neither the young people nor the adults seem to have the least idea of possible hanky-panky. (I don’t believe this was because young people matured later in those days: Jane Austen’s Lydia eloped with Mr Wickham when she was fifteen.) Mr Laurence, Laurie’s grandfather and guardian and at times quite a stern fellow, observes: ‘He can’t get into mischief in that little nunnery over there.’ Why not? It is left to the worldly Moffat family to speculate about ‘Mrs M’s plans’ to marry off her eldest to the rich neighbour’s grandson. Of course Mrs March has no such plans, but did it really never cross anyone’s mind that some romantic attachment might form? It seems not. Laurie is admitted into the family as a sort of honorary brother, a companion in romps and the occasional target for moral lectures, and for several years he plays this role so faultlessly that I decide against all likelihood that he must be gay, and I still think it’s a pity he isn’t. Eventually romance blooms, is killed, blooms again ... and he marries Amy, though if he can’t be gay I really think he should have married his first love, Jo, who won’t have him because they are too much alike.
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