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Re/Constructing the Female Writer: Subjectivity in the Feminist Künstlerroman

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SOURCE: Trites, Roberta Sellinger. “Re/Constructing the Female Writer: Subjectivity in the Feminist Künstlerroman.” In Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Literature, pp. 63-79. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Trites evaluates a sub-genre of the children's künstlerroman—the feminist children's book künstlerroman—where the protagonist is a child developing self-identity through her desire to become a writer.]

Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters examines what it means to one girl that she is a writer; so does Patricia MacLachlan's Cassie Binegar. Both of these novels depict a girl who claims the subject position by learning to use her voice, but significantly, each character learns to use her voice not only as a matter of speaking but also as a matter of writing. Because writing and re-visioning have so much potential to help people understand their agency, quite a few feminist children's novels explore what it means for children to write. The resulting novels seek to explore how children write, why they write, and what they gain as individuals during the process.

One step in understanding such novels is to understand the conventions of the Bildungsroman, the novel of development, and of the Künstlerroman, the novel of artistic development. In the introduction to The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland note the traditions of the female Bildungsroman. Historically, the female protagonist's growth is less direct than her male counterpart's; the independence that maturation dictates for male characters is often hampered for females by the heroine's belief that she can only develop to her fullest potential if she is intimately involved in relationships with other people. As a result, many female Bildungsromane focus on the character's development as a function of the interpersonal relationships she maintains (Abel, Hirsch, and Langland 11). Annis Pratt demonstrates how often the so-called growth of the hero of a female Bildungsroman is marked by her retreating from life rather than becoming fully involved in it (36).

As a specialized form of the Bildungsroman, the Künstlerroman is a novel of development, but the development deals specifically with the growth of the artist. In a number of traditional female Künstlerromane, the heroine's self-identification as an artist is either balanced or negated by a love relationship. For example, Jo March gives up her perception of herself as primarily a novelist to marry Professor Bhaer. Judy Abbott “suppose[s] I could keep on being a writer even if I did marry” near the end of Daddy-Long-Legs, but since she never mentions writing as a career again, her supposition is unconvincing (181-82). In Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Francie Nolan makes a pact with God that she will not write anymore if her mother will survive a serious illness. Francie later realizes that she need not necessarily sacrifice her writing forever, but she clearly does not perceive herself primarily as a writer by the novel's end. She concentrates more on going to college and getting married than on writing.

But within the genre of the children's Künstlerroman exists a subgenre, the feminist Künstlerroman, which demonstrates the growth of a child whose identity is consistently formed by her desire to be a writer. Different from books like Lois Lowry's Anastasia Krupnik (1979), wherein writing is only one of the protagonist's myriad activities, the protagonist of the feminist children's Künstlerroman is a writer whose writing is her entire being. Furthermore, she never sacrifices her writing for the sake of a love relationship. In “Portrait of the Young Writer in Children's Fiction” (1977), Francis Molson briefly surveys a collection of children's novels about developing writers, including Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy (1964), Irene Hunt's Up a Road Slowly (1968), Jean Little's Look through My Window, Eleanor Cameron's A Room Made of Windows (1971), and Mollie Hunter's A Sound of Chariots (1972). Never once does Molson make note of the fact that the young writers of his survey are all female. That so many children's novels involve girls learning about the power of language indicates, however, that the genre is a powerful forum for feminist writers.

Harriet the Spy and A Sound of Chariots both exemplify the characteristics of the feminist Künstlerroman. The protagonists of these novels accept language as primary to their self-creation, and they live through words, ultimately recognizing that they are powerless without them. In this regard, both of these novels are a study in the use of textual subjectivity, for as each of these girls recognizes the primacy of language in her life, she achieves an understanding of the matrices of subject positions she occupies as a writer, a female, a family member, and a friend. Most important, each of these girls learns to “write her self,” to “put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement” (Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa” 875). Each of these feminist writers changes her perception of herself and her world by writing.

Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy is the prototypical feminist children's Künstlerroman largely because Harriet is one of the earliest characters to experience a number of the genre's conventions. First, Harriet defines herself as different from other people. She clings to her individualism by wearing androgynous clothing, by eating tomato sandwiches, and by rejecting such signs of social conformity as dance class and bridge club. She also separates herself from other people by spying on them, that is, by putting herself in the subject position and them in the object position. Something of a Peeping Tom, Harriet watches people through windows and cracked doors and then writes down what she has observed because, as she tells a friend, “I've seen them and I want to remember them” (11). Harriet recognizes that words make her memories permanent. Language thus has great power for her because it is only through words that she can perceive her own past.

Harriet does not necessarily intend to objectify people when she is trying to affix them in her memory, but she nevertheless does. She dons her father's eyeglasses, which could be interpreted as the symbolic spectacles of the patriarchy, before she goes to spy on people, and she sits in judgment of them as she peers through the lenses. She calls Mrs. Plumber “Boring” (45) and Franca Dei Santi “Dull” (57). Of the Robinsons she writes: “Some People Think they're Perfect but … I'm Glad I'm not Perfect—I'd be Bored to Death. Besides if they're so Great why do they just Sit there all Day Staring at Nothing? They could be Crazy and not even Know it” (68). Harriet has little empathy for these people because she sees them as little more than fodder (objects) with which she can feed her own thoughts and writings.

Harriet, however, defines writing as absolutely crucial to her self-expression. When the notebook in which she records all her thoughts is taken from her, she feels completely powerless: “Without a notebook she couldn't spy, she couldn't take notes, she couldn't play Town, she couldn't do anything. She was afraid to go and buy another one, and for once she didn't feel like reading” (257). As Francis Molson notes, Harriet feels that “words can give external shape” to her imaginative processes (“Another Look” 964), so without her notebooks she feels alienated from her own creativity. Molson adds, “Surely one of the book's strengths is its depiction of Harriet's awareness that she can fully know only when she can verbalize her thoughts” (“Another Look” 965). As is common for the protagonist of the feminist children's Künstlerroman, Harriet fully understands how powerful language is only when she analyzes her own need to write.

Another convention of the feminist Künstlerroman that Harriet experiences is a disruption of her home life that causes her great grief. Harriet mourns deeply when her nanny, Ole Golly, leaves to get married. In Harriet's case, the grief she feels coincides with ostracism from her community; such ostracism is also a convention of the feminist children's Künstlerroman. For Harriet, the rejection of her community occurs shortly after Ole Golly's departure when Harriet's classmates read her private notebooks and begin to shun her. As a result of feeling so isolated from other people, Harriet exhibits yet another convention of the feminist child writer: she learns to shift her subject position.

That Harriet needs to learn to shift her subjectivity is clearly outlined in the novel. For example, early in the narrative Harriet wonders how lonely she would be flying around space if the universe blows up. Harriet does not perceive that she, too, would be destroyed along with everyone else (79). Later, Harriet egocentrically assumes that Mr. Waldenstein will move in with Ole Golly in the bedroom next to Harriet's after they get married (97). Ironically, Harriet accuses her mother of not thinking “about other people much” (102). Harriet certainly thinks of other people, but only as the objects of her spying; at this point in the novel she is incapable of even temporarily imagining their subject positions.

But eventually Harriet develops the ability to see herself as other people might. As part of the persecution she receives at the hands of her classmates, someone spills ink all over Harriet. The scene takes on the significance of being a ritual baptism, for after Harriet is washed in the metaphorical waters of her chosen profession, she has the epiphany that enables her to switch subject positions. Significantly, she actually employs linguistics to define this switch. When she realizes that her classmates have named the secret club they have formed The Spy Catcher Club, she thinks, “So it was she, Harriet, that they were talking about. She was her. How odd, she thought, to think of yourself as her” (223). Harriet initially identifies herself with grammatical correctness by using the nominative pronoun that the verb “to be” requires. But then she ungrammatically shifts her self-identification to the objective pronoun: “She was her.” Far from being a simple lapse of grammar, the change in pronoun case signifies the first time that Harriet is capable of perceiving herself as other people do and as she has perceived other people: in the object position.

Shortly after this experience, the text articulates an aesthetic philosophy which can guide Harriet. This articulation, itself a convention of the feminist children's Künstlerroman, triggers another convention of novels about feminist child writers when Harriet transforms her private writing into public writing. As with many feminist Künstlerromane, the aesthetic philosophy is inspired by a mentor.1 Ole Golly writes to Harriet and tells her, “If you are ever going to be a writer it is time you got cracking. You are eleven years old and haven't written a thing but notes” (275). Ole Golly quotes John Keats on truth and beauty to remind Harriet that as an art form, writing is a way to create beauty and express truths.2 Then, in a classic moment of self-contradiction, Ole Golly tells Harriet that sometimes she is going to have to lie about her writing. Ole Golly justifies her advice: “Remember that writing is to put love in the world, not to use against your friends. But to yourself you must always tell the truth” (276). The greatest weakness in Harriet the Spy is in this statement of the text's aesthetic philosophy. Ole Golly's advice is little more than the classic feminine reversion to deceit to survive in the patriarchal world. Nevertheless, the advice—traditional as it is—gives Harriet the ability to share her writing with other people. She writes a story that she sends to the New Yorker, and then she begins to write for her school newspaper.

This act marks the final and most crucial stage of the feminist children's Künstlerroman. In traditional male Künstlerromane such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the writer rejects his community and decides to pursue his art isolated from the sullying influence of a philistine world. In the traditional female Künstlerroman, however, the female writer often gives up her primary identity as a writer: to wit, Jo March perceives her roles as wife, mother, and headmistress as more important than her role as a writer by the end of Little Women. Thus, as Marianne Hirsch notes, male heroes in nineteenth-century Künstlerromane find a salvation in art that helps them avoid the female's almost mandated death, for pursuing art is rarely a resolution that female characters could pursue during that era (“Spiritual Bildung” 28). For male protagonists, the Künstlerroman establishes imagination and the inward life as a “solution” to the struggles he experiences, but for nineteenth-century female protagonists, focusing inward results only in stultification (Hirsch, “Spiritual Bildung” 46-47).

Like Harriet the Spy, Jo March has perceived herself as outside her culture. She has experienced the domestic grief of Beth's death, she has gone public with her writing, and she has learned to shift her subject position when she (unfortunately) perceives herself through Professor Bhaer's eyes. She even views herself through his “moral spectacles” in much the same way that Harriet wears her father's glasses: “Being a little shortsighted, Mr. Bhaer sometimes used eye-glasses, and Jo had tried them once, smiling to see how they magnified the fine print of her book; now she seemed to have got on the Professor's mental or moral spectacles also, for the faults of these poor stories glared at her dreadfully and filled her with dismay” (Little Women 322). Nevertheless, despite undergoing many of the stages of the feminist Künstlerroman that Harriet experiences, eventually Jo ceases to identify herself primarily as a writer.3 As Hirsch notes of many nineteenth-century novels by women, art is ultimately not a solution for Jo as a female protagonist (“Spiritual Bildung” 28).

Investigating the nuances of the Künstlerroman within children's literature, Jan Alberghene observes that in American children's books, artists often learn to place their community before their art. Many child characters in such novels decide that their community is more important than their individual need for artistic expression (From Alcott 1). But the feminist children's Künstlerroman modifies the paradigmatic endings of the (adult) male, the (adult) female, and the children's Künstlerroman. As in the typical children's Künstlerroman, the feminist protagonist reconciles herself to her community, but with this significant difference: she insists on maintaining her primary identity as a writer, as the protagonist of a traditional male Künstlerroman does and as the protagonist of a traditional female Künstlerroman does not.

Thus, at the end of Harriet the Spy, Harriet reconciles herself to her friends and identifies with them in a traditionally female act of empathy. In the final pages, she sees her closest friends, Janie and Sport, approaching her in the park, and she thinks:

They were so far away that they looked like dolls. They made her think of the way she imagined the people when she played Town. Somehow this way she could see them better than she ever had before. She looked at them each carefully in the longish time it took them to reach her. She made herself walk in Sport's shoes, feeling the holes in his socks rub against his ankles. She pretended she had an itchy nose when Janie put one abstracted hand up to scratch. She felt what it would feel like to have freckles and yellow hair like Janie, then funny ears and skinny shoulders like Sport.

(297)

Harriet has certainly learned to shift her subject position and to do what it takes to reconcile herself with her culture. But more important, she still identifies herself as a writer. One of the final sentences in the book is something Harriet writes in her journal: “Now that Things are Back to Normal I can get Some Real Work done” (298). The final sentences, “She slammed the book and stood up. All three of them turned then and walked along the river” (298), show that Harriet has learned to work within her community without sacrificing her art.

Lissa Paul calls Harriet the Spy “a successful female künstlerroman” because a “double feminist trick is in play”: Harriet “tricks” her classmates into accepting her journals as fiction when she writes them up for the school paper, and Fitzhugh “tricks critics” into approving of the text's duplicitous morality (“Feminist Writer” 67). Paul defines the following as feminist conventions at work in Harriet the Spy: Harriet “prefers a small-scale form of writing (the private notebook); she juggles her role in society (her popularity with her classmates) with her role as a writer (which demands selfishness); she is concerned with being truthful, but ultimately discovers that that necessitates lying; and she finds that domestic gossip constitutes a valid form of fiction” (67). I would argue that the “small-scale form” of Harriet's writing has as much to do with her being a child as her being female and that the juggling act between the writer's social and artistic roles is a concern in most Künstlerromane, regardless of the protagonist's gender. And while Paul's assessment of Harriet's deceit as a female survival tactic is accurate, I hesitate to label this duplicity “feminist.” I think, instead, Harriet is accepting a traditional gender role. What seems to me to be more feminist about the text is Harriet's refusal to give up her identity as writer. No matter how much pressure her parents, teachers, and friends exert on her, as the novel ends she is still triumphantly a writer.

Mollie Hunter's A Sound of Chariots, a largely autobiographical Künstlerroman, also demonstrates many of the conventions of the feminist children's Künstlerroman, despite a historical setting that might initially seem to preclude an articulation of feminist values.4 Bridie McShane is a young girl in post-World War I Scotland who uses writing to come to terms with her father's death. Unlike Harriet the Spy, which gradually builds toward the disequilibrium of grief that Ole Golly's departure causes Harriet, A Sound of Chariots opens with the death that causes the protagonist's acute sense of alienation. Thus, the entire novel is about Bridie's attempts to reconcile herself to her community while she develops artistically. Writing proves to be the means through which she effects this reconciliation.

Bridie perceives herself as a writer before her father ever dies; in fact, it is he who suggests that she might one day write a book (61). Because of his belief in her, she proudly proclaims, “I'm going to be an authoress!” (81). Her proclamation leads her sisters to mock her: “Author-ass! Author-ass!” (81). Her love of language makes her different from her sisters, and this difference is the source of their ostracism. Not only does she feel no sense of community with them, but she also even labels them “the Others” to confirm her own subject position by objectifying them.

Despite her sisters' teasing, Bridie loves words, “for the sound and the feel of them and the marvelous way they allowed her to unlock ideas from her mind” (82). Her metaphor for the writing experience is to describe herself as being like a prompter at a play: “The difference was that the copy she had was being written out while the play went on, and it was not she who prompted the actors. When she was stuck for a word, they prompted her” (84). Her understanding of language is both passive and postmodern: language exists as an exterior force that constructs who she is and what she writes. Yet Bridie's father has told her that “everyone's entitled to a private place in the mind” (111). She may be constructed by language, but she is, nevertheless and indisputably, an individual.

Although Bridie has established an identity for herself as a writer before her father's death, she does not fully understand the power that language can give her until she seeks a means to reconcile the subject/object split that she experiences as a result of her grief for her father. Bridie has been her father's favorite child, so his death devastates the nine-year-old girl. Although she has valued her mother's affection, it is her father's approbation that means the most to her. In the final outing before his death, while gazing at a photograph of herself, Bridie sees how much she physically resembles her father. The resulting feeling of connection she feels with him gives her great pleasure (114). But after he dies, she feels even more isolated from her community than she has before: “Everything seemed slower and quieter than it had been before and nothing that happened seemed to connect directly with her” (119).

Moreover, she experiences an increasing sense of terror as she recognizes her own mortality. She has a recurring nightmare in which she experiences herself as a fragmented body:

The nightmare … always took the same form. All the men in their street—the blind men, the legless, the armless ones—were standing in a silent, motionless group outside the wooden fence surrounding the little graveyard in front of the church. They were all looking in the same direction. … The something they were gazing at was a dismembered body. She could see all the different parts of it, each lying in the pool of its own blood, and as she watched she saw that each of the dismembered limbs was moving as if it was still alive. Then she became aware that the sound she could hear was the head crying feebly aloud, and with a rush of pity she realized that the body was alive and that its separated head was crying desperately for help.


None of the cripples moved to help it. She cried urgently to them, “It's still alive! Help it, please help it!” But the group of misshapen men, as if they had not heard her, continued to stand there as silent and motionless as some grotesque waxworks show.


She had to help it. It was impossible to leave the poor thing there, crying out like that. She crept towards it. The head turned and looked at her. She saw her own face and realized that the thing was herself.

(122)

A powerful evocation of the fragmented self, this passage's depiction of corporeal dismemberment is not unlike some of the imagery Margaret Atwood employs in The Edible Woman (1969) and Surfacing (1972) to represent women's fragmentation in modern culture. Although initially in the dream Bridie feels that she has some agency, for it is she who must help the fragmented body, when Bridie sees herself not only in the object position of the veterans' gazes but as an actual object, a “thing,” she loses that sense of her own agency and becomes immobilized.

This sense of powerlessness comes from her fear of death, her recognition that if death “could happen to [her father], it could happen to her!” (133). The passage that leads to this recognition emphasizes the importance of Bridie's subject position. As she and her brother and sisters prepare to bury a rabbit that has died, “She saw that Moira and Aileen and William looked very solemn and that Nell had an earnest, uplifted expression on her face. But close as they all were to her, she had the curious impression that they were tiny and faraway as if she was seeing them through the wrong end of the telescope” (131, emphasis added). Bridie runs away from “the Others” because she fears she is going blind, and she ends up standing in the lane, where she recognizes her own mortality. But her anagnorisis, that is, her moment of self-recognition, has been clearly predicated on shifting her subject position; her blindness is replaced by a confusing vision of herself as both subject and object.

Bridie experiences this anagnorisis in terms as visceral as her nightmares have been. “In panic revulsion from the thought she jerked upright as if she could pull herself physically away from it,” but she scrapes her hand across some brier-rose thorns (133). As she watches the blood that oozes from the scratches, she thinks: “This was her life, these shiny red drops welling from her skin, and with the inescapable fact that she would die some day still beating in her brain she was suddenly seeing them with an acuteness of vision that made it seem as if a skin had been peeled from her eyes” (133). Bridie is experiencing a subject split: is she object/blood or is she subject/vision?

This split is exacerbated when Bridie goes to pick violets for her mother's birthday. Bridie has been overwhelmed by her mother's grief and hopes that the flowers will comfort the grieving woman. The girl climbs over a stone fence to get to the bank where the flowers grow and lands in a pile of lambs' tails that a shepherd has recently shorn. Bridie is repulsed at the “blood and bits of bodies” (156); this dismemberment scene seems to be an enactment of her nightmare. But Bridie grows because of this virtual immersion in corporality. She has literally bathed herself in the blood of the lamb; the paschal image is reinforced when she shares red wine and bread with the shepherd's wife, who tries to calm the hysterical girl. And after sharing this female communion, Bridie can finally separate herself from her mother's grief:

She didn't care about her mother now because she just couldn't bear any more horrifying things to happen. She was finished with her mother's grief now, finished with it. She wouldn't think about it ever again. She couldn't bear to think of it or the thing she had dreaded would come true again. The nightmare of the body in the churchyard would come smothering down on her in broad daylight like it had when her face had been pressed down into the blood and bits of bodies and she would scream and scream and scream till her head exploded in screaming.

(158)

The blood imagery prefigures Bridie's menarche, which is a vital stage in her maturation (228-29), but Bridie's recognition of herself as separate from her mother is an even more crucial stage in her artistic development. She is beginning to recognize that her interior world is the source of her own agency.

Bridie's employer, Mr. Purves, cautions Bridie: “You think too much and you see too much and it's all there in your face” (180). This “revelation” causes Bridie to lead what she considers a double life; she learns to act like “an empty-headed chatterbox” to conceal that “underneath this there was the other part of her mind, like another person watching all her antics and observing the effect they had” (182-83). Bridie is still living in the subject/object split, viewing herself dispassionately but still significantly engaged in the act of viewing. She intentionally uses the double position that this split affords her as a way to separate herself from her fear of “Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near” (194). When she engages her subjectivity to view herself in the object position, she feels victorious: “As if she was on a different plane then, another level of living entirely from the moment as it existed for those taking part in it, she would see it suddenly projected with a strange, objective clarity in front of her. And with a thrill of triumph she would know that she had snatched yet another moment from the wasteful stream of living running past her; another moment of time had been caught and petrified forever in her memory” (215). Like Harriet, Bridie considers memory a form of self-definition, and like Harriet, she recognizes that memory is language-bound.

Bridie's capacity to understand herself with a double vision ultimately becomes the aesthetic philosophy that underpins A Sound of Chariots. The text insists that a writer must be someone who both lives in the world and who removes herself from it to view it objectively. This doubleness turns the novel into a triumphant admixture of the traditional male Künstlerroman and the feminist children's Künstlerroman: the writer should be simultaneously detached from and immersed in her community.

Grace Stewart notes that this sense of double vision is a convention in the Künstlerroman, but she argues, “Whereas the man feels split between personal and social being, the woman experiences that split and the separation of sexual and personal identity” (175). Bridie does seem to have difficulty with her sexual identity. Her fondest early memories include being her father's favorite child because she is a tomboy, and later she rejects menstruation, declaring, “I won't have it! I won't let it happen to me!” (227). Stewart notes that in many Künstlerromane written by women, birds are mutilated in some way or another (177). As an image of artistic freedom, birds show the destruction of the female artist. Yet in A Sound of Chariots it is not birds who are shown to be destroyed; instead, it is a rabbit, a traditional symbol of female fertility, that is dead. When linked with Bridie's androgyny, the dead rabbit indicates the girl's rejection of one traditional role of the female subject: that of procreator.

Like Harriet, Bridie has a mentor, her English teacher, Dr. McIntyre, who directly advises her about what it means to be a writer. He calls Bridie “a poet-in-embryo” and chants her name over and over (219) in a passage that Sarah Smedman identifies as “a kind of ritualistic calling her forth to and priestly confirmation of her sacred vocation” (137). Dr. McIntyre also reinforces the double aesthetics of A Sound of Chariots when he tells Bridie that experience “can only be constructive if the subject of it succeeds in building outwards from it. Otherwise, there is only a self-destructive burrowing-inwards, a futile self-consumption of intellect that is the antithesis of creativeness. For creativeness, my child, is all outgoing. It is experience absorbed and put forth again in a finer form” (220). Here McIntyre seems to be counseling Bridie to write for other people, as Ole Golly might say, “To put love in the world” (Fitzhugh 276). But later, McIntyre reminds Bridie that “you always will be alone. … Alone in your mind, that is, for you have chosen the loneliest of all vocations—or rather, I should say, it has chosen you” (237). This time, McIntyre articulates the masculine mythos of the poet as removed from any community. Note, however, that McIntyre's metaphor places Bridie in the object position: poetry has chosen her rather than her choosing to be a poet. The metaphor implies the primacy of language: language constructs the subject rather than the subject constructing language.

McIntyre's most compelling advice to Bridie is for her to “live” for her father: “Don't let your talent die because he is dead. Let it flower from his death and speak for both of you!” (238). McIntyre's advice is not the paternal advice that it initially might seem to be; it is not an insistence that Bridie become her father, for she interprets it to mean that she should use her memory of her father and the pain she has felt as the inspiration to become the writer she wants to be. Although grief has caused her to feel alienated from other people, it has also provided her with the inspiration to write, and through writing, she finally feels reconnected to the world. For example, by the end of the novel, Bridie has learned to work with her sisters at communal tasks (165), and she has openly acknowledged her acceptance of her mother and the pride she feels for her (213, 239). These reconciliations mark Bridie's readiness to move to a larger community where she can work and send her wages home to help support her family. Thus, ironically, Bridie takes her place in the community by leaving it.

In the novel's final image, Bridie rides a tram to her new home in Edinburgh. She describes seeing “a great vase of full-blown roses, white roses looking with soft, ghostly faces at her out of the purple-black darkness of the empty room behind them” (242). She has left the familiar community of her childhood home, so in a sense she is like the roses, which have reached maturity but bloom removed from their community. She feels herself to be a “galleon plunging through perilous seas,” but her guiding star will be the poetry she will write. And she has maintained her self-image of herself as a writer. The final lines in the text assert that all she will need to write is “a little light, a little time” (242); all she will need is a room of her own. The ramifications for feminism are important. Bridie clearly feels herself at one with language. So, for that matter, does Harriet. In fact, the only way these girls know how to define themselves is through language. Through language and in writing, they accept their own subjectivities, gaining a voice and rejecting the silencing that their cultures seem to expect of them.

The protagonist of the feminist children's Künstlerroman need not necessarily be female. For example, Beverly Cleary's Dear Mr. Henshaw displays a number of the genre's conventions, even though the androgynously named protagonist, Leigh Botts, is male. He suffers from the grief caused by his parents' divorce; he feels like an outsider because his mother and he moved after the divorce; he feels ostracized because someone steals the best part of his lunch every day. He has a mentor, the children's author, Mr. Henshaw, who inspires him to write, although it is actually Leigh's mother who articulates the text's aesthetic philosophy after she reads a letter from Mr. Henshaw. Leigh writes to tell Mr. Henshaw his mother's advice: “She says … I should read, look, listen, think and write” (14). Leigh goes public with his writing when his school sponsors a writing contest. He has a moment of self-recognition when his writing is validated by a woman who is a published author. She calls him an “author,” and she tells him he writes well because “you wrote like you, and you did not try to imitate someone else” (118, 119-20). By the end of the novel, Leigh has accepted himself as a writer and has been accepted into his community. If his self-acceptance seems more inevitable than Harriet's or Bridie's has, perhaps that is because he is a male in a culture where assuming the role of writer has been more easily granted to men than women, but the novel is still more feminist than not in its workings.5

Not every novel written in the last thirty years about a child writer qualifies as a feminist children's Künstlerroman, however. Sheila Greenwald has written a number of novels that involve girls who are developing their talents at writing, most notably It All Began with Jane Eyre: Or, the Secret Life of Franny Dillman (1980) and the books in her Rosy Cole series. Greenwald's books are humorous and her protagonists are spunky, but they use their writing talents primarily as a way to get involved in romantic relationships. Franny Dillman's greatest achievement does not seem to be the book she's written; it's that she's finally been noticed by a boy. Ditto for Rosy Cole in Rosy's Romance (1989).

Even books as disparate as Ellen Conford's Jenny Archer, Author (1989) and Barbara Wersba's Love Is the Crooked Thing (1987) are not this obvious. Although written for quite a young reading audience, Jenny Archer learns the difference between creating fiction and nonfiction, and she finds her imaginative creativity affirmed. Similarly, although the protagonist of the young adult novel Love Is the Crooked Thing initially worries more about her relationship with her boyfriend than anything, eventually she realizes that her writing matters more to her than he does. While neither Conford's nor Wersba's book develops a protagonist who learns to “write herself,” as Cixous would say, their books display more of the conventions of the feminist children's Künstlerroman than Greenwald's books do.

While Michael Cadden was a graduate student in one of my seminars, he pointed out that the biggest difference between traditional and feminist children's Künstlerromane is that in the feminist ones, the texts end before the child protagonist grows up and “gets boring,” as he put it; that is, the novel ends before the protagonist enters the typical gender-encoded roles of courtship. Annis Pratt refers to this pattern as “dwarfing” or “dulling a hero's initiative and restraining her maturation” (41). Jo March in Little Women, Judy Abbott in Daddy-Long-Legs, Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Julie Bishop in Up a Road Slowly, and Julia Redfern in The Private Worlds of Julia Redfern (1988) all end up as young adults preoccupied by love interests; they lose the sense of autonomy that has made them interesting characters in the first place.

That Eleanor Cameron's Julia Redfern series ends with Julia's immersion in a romantic relationship seems particularly disappointing. After all, she is a girl who, like Bridie McShane, recognizes the interiority of the writing process:

As I'm writing, I'm hearing and seeing it all—the story—and it's like a play, because there's the dialogue and you're listening inside your head to just how a person would say something. You have to hear the tone and the way of saying and the rhythm, just as you do onstage when you're rehearsing your lines. And you're seeing it all happen. If you can't, how could you know what each character is doing every moment, in relation to the others, just how they're sitting or standing or turning and moving off the stage of your scene.

(The Private Worlds 194)

The process makes Julia feel powerful: she is the creator of whole worlds. And like Harriet, Julia recognizes herself as a writer when she is quite young (That Julia Redfern 15-17); she even publishes at an early age (A Room Made of Windows 267). But in having the luxury of developing a character over the course of five novels, Cameron transforms Julia from a rebellious child artist into a fairly predictable lovelorn adolescent. Although Julia does not give up her identity as a writer (which is what keeps the series from being nonfeminist), by the end of the final volume of the series, when Julia feels “unaccountably joyous and hopeful” (218), her hopes are directed not toward her writing ambitions but toward her boyfriend's return (which is what keeps the series from being strongly feminist, either).

Feminist children's Künstlerromane demonstrate protagonists who recognize their agency because of their writing. Novels in the genre share a number of characteristics, but the most important is the character's immersion in language that allows her to emerge as an artist who participates in her community without sacrificing her art. Her art and her voice are one. The protagonist of the feminist children's Künstlerroman transcends the obstacles that confront her and emerges a fledgling artist.

Notes

  1. One significant problem that Jo March faces is this lack of an encouraging mentor; her mentor figure, Professor Bhaer, actually discourages her writing. Beverly Lyon Clark catalogs the “devaluation” of writing that occurs throughout the novel (90).

  2. Lissa Paul asserts that “Ole Golly usually doesn't quite understand what she reads. She quotes a lot, but can't explain the quotations” (“Feminist Writers” 67-68). Nevertheless, although Ole Golly can't fully explain Dostoievsky (as Francis Molson has noted [“Another Look” 966]), the complete appropriateness of Ole Golly's use of Keats indicates that she does, in fact, understand this particular quotation and that she is intentionally and accurately applying it to a pertinent context.

  3. Paul points out that Alcott achieves, in a sense, a sort of subversive victory with Little Women in that even though Jo gives up her identity as writer, it is still Jo-the-writer, the rebellious character of the first two thirds of the book, who remains alive in readers' memories (“Coming Second,” chap. 8). On the other hand, Estes and Lant call the ending of Little Women a “spiritual murder” (103), a “desperate mutilation” of both Jo and the text itself (116), as Alcott grafts onto Jo Beth's compliant characteristics to transform the rebellious young writer into the image of Victorian domesticity.

  4. In her acceptance speech of the 1992 Phoenix award at the Nineteenth International Children's Literature Association Conference in Hartford, Connecticut, Hunter stated that everything that happened in Sound of Chariots really happened to her when she was a child.

  5. Note, too, that Leigh's mother struggles and succeeds at building a life for herself and her son after her divorce. She does not perceive herself as a victim because the divorce has been her choice.

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Alas, Alack! or A Lass, a Lack? Quarrels of Gender and Genre in the Revisionist Künstlerroman: Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples