"If you hadn't disobeyed me, you wouldn't be a quadriplegic now. Let that be a lesson to you!"

[rachelmanija]

In the last couple nights, I have dreamed of being invaded by clowns, that telophase was dying, that I had absent-mindedly showed up for physical therapy naked, and that I was falling down a cliff (at great length, because I kept grabbing tree roots that would sloooowly snap, sending me plummeting until I grabbed the next tree root) and it was all my fault for taking a short cut.

I think I am anxious about some upcoming submissions.

The last dream reminds me of the lifechanging accidents suffered by kids in What Katy Did, Emily of New Moon, one of the Malory Towers books where a girl is warned not to go swimming and she does and the current bangs her against the rocks, and some Isabelle Hoffman book where a girl climbs a cliff and falls into the ocean, and a dog that's a drunk and lonely old man's sole companion swims out to save her and apparently drowns, leaving her to suffer agonies of guilt until it reappears the next day. After they end up paralyzed or noticed by creepy old men or the dog drowns or whatever, they always get lectured on how it was all their fault. Insult to injury!

What strikes me about many of these books is that in many cases, the activity is not obviously dangerous or has never been dangerous before-- going swinging in What Katy Did; swimming in the school pool in the Malory Towers book-- but has become dangerous because of some factor which the adult knows about-- a staple holding the swing to the roof broke; currents are dangerous in this time of year-- but does not tell the girl about, because children shouldn't need to know why, but ought to blindly obey anything an adult tells them for any reason. Then when they go swinging or swimming and end up severely injured, they are lectured on obedience.

I note a couple things about these stories:

1. These are almost all books written before 1960. Cautionary tales for children and teenagers certainly do exist after that time, but generally in those, adults do tell the kids why they shouldn't do things, but the kids go ahead and do them anyway. These more modern books tend to involve particular social issues, like drunk driving, joining gangs, doing drugs, and so forth, rather than random and unique accidents.

I am guessing that there was a major change in ideas about parenting and adult-child relationships during the sixties, in which people realized that perhaps blind obedience was not that great, and that it's OK for children to ask why, and OK for adults to tell them.

2. There is a related idea which I have come across much more occasionally, but which annoyed me recently in the Noel Streatfeild novels The Growing Summer and The Circus is Coming. In both of these, children who have led a sheltered life are suddenly thrown into a society in which children are expected to be far more independent. In both books, the children are mocked and criticized by adults for not knowing how to do things which no one ever taught them, but when they ask adults to teach them, the adults mock and criticize them for that and tell them they are supposed to figure things out on their own without asking for help. When they figure it out wrong, they're mocked and critized; when they get it right, the adults are nice.

I find that attitude really despicable, and am glad that it seems to have died out to the extent that no one writes books any more where it's presented as normal and good.

But between attitudes 1 and 2, it seems like the idea is that it's bad for adults to explain anything to children, but children are supposed to both obey adults to the letter, and also, being seen but not heard, carefully watch what others are doing and learn to imitate it without ever actually being taught. I am clearly the model of a modern person, because that seems like a dynamic perfectly designed to foster mindless conformity and child abuse.

3. These pre-1960s stories only seems to happen to girls. Can anyone think of a similar story involving a boy? I find it significant that the girls are often punished for doing physical, unfeminine activities like swinging high and climbing cliffs, and that their punishment is the loss of their physical abilities. There's a great statement of ideas about what girls should and should not do, and what happens to them if they disobey.

Comments

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I have nothing useful to contribute, but I'm very intrigued by the ideas you've presented. I have seen both these themes.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I just added a little bit pulling attitudes 1 and 2 together after posting, BTW.

Do you remember any other books like that? I know these themes recur often, but I can only the recall the ones I've mentioned.

Beth getting scarlet fever because she was so nice and charitable is rather different, I think, as no one ever suggests that she was wrong to visit the febrile family.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

Scenario number one does remind me a bit of a thing in the Harry Potter series (involving Dumbledore and Harry; don't know if you're a fan so I won't prattle about it). I can think of similar things in genre stories where the leader/ mentor keeps secrets to the detriment of the student/child/etc. However, in the newer versions of this trope, the fault is usually presented as falling at least equally on the leader/mentor.

Example -- in the very old Xmen comics (a series that started in 1963), Professor Xavier would frequently withhold some information from his team, and only tell them AFTER they had gotten through a dangerous situation in which the team could have used the information. And they might grumble a little bit but would basically be like "you did it for our own good, you're so smart!" These days, Xavier still tries to pull things like that, but he usually gets called on it -- which might be due both to a greater complexity in characterization, but also a younger of generation of writers questioning the assumptions of their (figurative and literal) parents. That would fit in nicely with your theory about shifting attitudes, even though the parental relationships in these stories aren't usually literal.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Good point. That is particularly noticeable in Joss Whedon's recent "Danger Room" arc.

PS. Icon love!

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

Also on number 3 -- the quintessential "girls' adventure" fairy tale is "Red Riding Hood" where the moral is 'don't stray from the path'; the boy's equivalent would be 'Jack and the Beanstalk' where the moral is apparently "lie, cheat, steal and kill. Go Jack!"

WTF?

[collie13.livejournal.com]

When we lived in Spain while I was a child, I had access to a number of English collected-story books that were rather old -- I think they were from the 30's or 40's? They were gathered into books about boys, and books about girls. For the era they were written for, I suspect they too were quintessential examples of expected sexual role models in the UK.

As far as the books themselves, the girls' stories were about tea parties and who got invited to them and who was snubbed and who wore what... or titillated gossip about who was seen with whom and gosh! do you think they were going together?! The boys' stories, though, were things like heroic last stands in battle that saved the entire platoon against the dreaded Zulu, or daring adventures exploring the jungle, or desperate gallops across the plains to escape the primitive nomads and save the settlement, and other stuff like that. Very racist, very chauvinist, true... but also very exciting to me. My family was all pretty physically active, and we did horseback riding and other stuff like that, so I had some connection to what the boys were doing, and I wanted to read about and emulate that sort of excitement.

I had no real 'feel' for or connection to the girls' stories, and I remember being so horribly bored by them that I couldn't even finish the book. In my mind, the girls' stories weren't about me, a girl -- they were about some sort of dreadfully dull alien beings I didn't get along with, who didn't like me anyway.That's the major reason, I think, why I read boys' stories all through my childhood. They were wonderful -- that was who I wanted to be when I grew up! ;)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I am guessing that there was a major change in ideas about parenting and adult-child relationships during the sixties

Very much so. Authority in general was in bad odour during the 60's, so 'Because I say so' disappeared from the enlightened parent's lexicon and was replaced either by explanation or, alas, by an absence of any kind of direction at all. Parenting still hasn't totally found the balance, from what I see at work. Sometimes three year olds will listen to reason but very often they won't, and trying reason on a kid who is beyond reason is an exercise in futility.

The pattern you notice in the Noel Streatfield books, incidentally, is the traditonal Japanese way of training as well. Don't tell them how to do things, because learning is achieved through doing and imitation, and hit them when they do it wrong, which tells them it *is* wrong. Drives me mad too, even if I understand the mindset that says Verbal instruction is pointless when inculcating a physical art.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

You can see this going on today with Japanese martial arts that have been imported into the USA, and (from what I've seen) the younger generation of martial arts teachers in Japan. The old way was to teach by example, but contemporary sensei are much more likely to also verbally explain (or explain with a combination of words and touch) what muscle you're supposed to be using to do a technique.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Hmmm - Charlotte Yonge (Victorian novelist, High Anglican, not exactly YA as such but writing books that could safely be read to all the family by the fireside) has a number of incidents in her novels of contemporary life in which bad things happen to naughty boys, in fact I think rather more than happen to girls - the things that happen to girls tend to be more about shame and embarrassment than physical damage, though in one case Angela Underwood's frivolous behaviour in a boat leads to an accident and her brother's eventual death. (She becomes a nursing sister in the outback of Australia.) And Flora May's social ambitions lead her to employ a nursemaid who is insufficiently supervised and whose practices of child sedation lead to its death.

Doesn't Pollyanna disobey her aunt about something and get injured and bedridden (but nonetheless Glad! Glad!)?

There are also the stories (Arthur Ransome for the obvious, but a number of others I read as child) in which parents manifest a phlegmatic equanimity towards their offspring messing about in boats, doing potentially perilous stuff with horses, etc.

In the Streatfields, I wonder if this is actually reflecting her own experience of childhood, as recorded in The Vicarage Family? so actually possibly a generation or so out of date.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Pollyanna sneaks out of the house to do something her mean old stick of an aunt forbade her to do (watch fireworks? something harmless, I think), and falls off the roof (out of a tree? I can't sort my memories of the book out from my memories of the Hayley Mills movie) sneaking back in. I seem to recall (although this may truly be the movie's spin) that blame was allocated at least equally to the mean old aunt for being unreasonable and not appreciating the little ray of sunshine about the house in the first place. That is, I think the revelation and subsequent, humbled character change, is the adult's, not the child's.

[marith.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Would Captains Courageous count as a boy-counterpart? I haven't read it in years so can't remember if the crew of the ship actually teaches the spoiled rich boy hero along with mocking and criticizing.

Also strongly reminded of Earth Maiden Arjuna, which drove me up the wall for just that reason despite being otherwise very good:

Juna: Giant rampaging monster! Uh, I'm a magical girl, so...I attack it!

Mentor: That was dumb.

Juna: What? Why?

Mentor: You're really slow. I hope you figure it out before the Earth is destroyed and it's all your fault.

Juna: So tell me what to do already!

Mentor: La la la I am too obfuscative to even hear you.

Warning klaxons: *BEEP* Giant monster on horizon *BEEP*

Juna: ...

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I think they expect him to learn stuff, even though they mock at how useless he is at it.

As Awful Example of pernicious effects of boyish disobedience, there is the notorious Eric, or Little by Little, by Dean Farrar.

Elsewhere in Kipling, Mowgli is disobedient and therefore gets kidnapped by the banderlog.

[amberdulen.livejournal.com]

On My Honor (http://www.amazon.com/On-My-Honor-Yearling-Newbery/dp/0440466334) has a similar theme with boys.

From Publisher Weekly's review:

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Joel dares Tony to race out to a distant sandbar with him. Then the unthinkable occurs: Joel reaches the sandbar; Tony disappears. The realization slams into Joel with its hideous finality. Tony is dead, and it is all his fault. Joel's efforts to cope with his staggering sense of guilt are handled with stark reality, so that the reader shares his sense of the enormity of life's unfairness.

I am a bad, bad person, but I had to laugh at this summary. I've just read so many YA books-- especially Newbery Honor and Medal titles, and this is one too-- where similar things happen.

[janni.livejournal.com]

I remember reading a book about a boy who had a firecracker explode in his face, and who then went blind, which was of this genre.

I wonder if there wasn't a period before these books, in the 30s and 40s, say, when parents didn't bother with or didn't have time for warnings, and child injuries were generally higher, after which paying close attention and issuing warnings at all was considered enlightened and a sign of progress--and whether the notion of actually explaining the whys of this new parental attention didn't need another couple decades to develop after that.

[collie13.livejournal.com]

I think I remember that book. Wasn't it "Follow My Leader"? It was about how the boy triumphed over adversity; Leader was his seeing eye dog.

As I recall, the boy had the firecracker go off in his face because he took it away from a more careless boy who'd found it on July 5th, and lit it. The "responsible boy" was being more careful and looking before throwing it so he woudn't hurt anyone else -- and it went off early. Is that the one you're recalling?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Boys' stories are rife with lessons on manliness, loyalty, courage, duty, right up and through the fifties. Reinforced on TV, too, and not just disney. I remember a "Father Knows Best" ep in which the horrible teen-age girl and the brother are denied something of desperate importance, and he says, "You're lucky. You're a girl, so you can cry." And she sniffles, acknowledging it's true as he sits there with manly stoicness.

Looking back over a billion books read, it seems to me that girls being shamed into obedience went through bumps. Early in the twentieth C the lesson was that girls must be ladies because gentlemen only respect ladies. Thus we get the absurd situation in GraustarK in which the rabble of thieves do not touch the princess because she is obviously so pure a lady, she apparently has a nuclear force field around her. Just how many young women read this pernicious nonsense and thought that if they were extra polite and ladylike around abusers they would be treated with respect? And then blamed themselves afterward when it didn't work?

After the freedom of the twenties, and after the women going to work during the war years, there were swingbacks. Being a lady--knowing your place--conformity--the most venal of the examples I read were all written by women.

[octopedingenue.livejournal.com]

Whistling girls and crowing hens
Always come to some bad ends!



Eustace and Edmund have dreadful things happen to them for unfair reasons in The Chronicles of Narnia, but I'm not sure how much of that is punishment for disobedience and how much is religious allegory.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

Or alternately, that both of them were being selfish gits. That's entirely possible too :)

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Bingbingbing!

I don't know how to nest this into your thesis. A theme I noticed over and over in the works of Antonia Forest is that adults are capricious and unjust and don't comprehend and there is absolutely nothing to be done about this. Children must deal and not whinge about it.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Unlike Katy winning over Miss Jane in What Katy Did At School by being such an excellent sick-nurse. The trad school story (m & f) does have that theme that Justice Will Be Done, after a lot of enjoyable suffering - while upper lip is of course kept perfectly stiff - and angstiness.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I recall the Mallory Towers one as being 'she was told not to swim in the sea, but she was bored with the pool and said 'I'm a strong swimmer, nothing will happen to me' and gets caught that way. but there were plenty more - 'don't talk to strangers at night or you will get kidnapped' and 'sneaking out of the school to sing at the third-rate talent contest will lead do bad things (girl loses voice and learns lesson, becoming much less conceited in the progress) are incidents I recall.

On the other hand, there is daring Carlotta who grabs strange horses from a nearby field and jumps every hedge with them, or who gets - mildly - admonished 'do try not to jump off the diving board when <horrible character> is directly underneath' and none of _her_ adventures, IIRC, ever get punished, either by teachers or by fate. It's only the ones 'with lessons to learn' that Blyton didn't like whose adventures have dire consequences.

At the same time I recall a lot of pre-sixties books in which children of both sexes spend all day riding, hillwalking, or crawling through ruins, following pirates and other bad guys, sneaking onto trains, and other adventures more - all dangerous pursuits, but all approved by the writers, so they need no warnings and have no negative consequences.

Morality tales. Ugh. Re-reading Mallory Towers as an adult, I'm absolutely certain I would be one of the bullied girls, _but I shall read them until I've grokked how Blyton does omni_.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

how Blyton does omni

Very clunkily indeed, is my recollection.

[sterling-sara.livejournal.com]

The book I remember was for younger children, not YA. It was called simply Cautionary Tales and was full of poems entitled "James, who told lies and was eaten by a lion". There was another about a girl who made faces so often they stuck and the moral was that later in life she couldn't get married to a decent man. All those are certainly of the genre you describe, but I remember them being so surreal and detatched they were hilarious.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Hilaire Belloc, and the tongue is so far in the cheek that he's got ulcers.

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.


I can still recite "Matilda, Who Told Lies and was Burned To Death" from memory. I am generally well-rewarded *not* to do so.

Spoilers for Thelma & Louise and Million-Dollar Baby

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

In Little Women, Jo is angry at Amy (who had burned the only copy of Jo's first manuscript) and doesn't tell Amy that the ice is thin in the middle -- so Amy falls through the rotten ice and nearly dies. Meg also shares some of the responsibility for Beth's illness, since she refused to go either.

"Meg, I wish you'd go and see the Hummels. You know Mother
told us not to forget them." said Beth, ten days after Mrs. March's
departure.

"I'm too tired to go this afternoon," replied Meg, rocking
comfortably as she sewed.

"Can't you, Jo?" asked Beth.

"Too stormy for me with my cold."

"I thought it was almost well."

"It's well enough for me to go out with Laurie, but not well
enough to go to the Hummels'," said Jo, laughing, but looking a
little ashamed of her inconsistency.

However, later on:

But much as she liked to write for children,
Jo could not consent to depict all her naughty boys as
being eaten by bears or tossed by mad bulls because they did
not go to a particular Sabbath school, nor all the good infants
who did go as rewarded by every kind of bliss, from gilded
gingerbread to escorts of angels when they departed this life
with psalms or sermons on their lisping tongues.

Such moral literature was distributed by Mr. Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre.

These stories may niot be published much any more, but at least in Christian Fundamentalist circles, they are still told. My youngest sister attended a sermon on Science and Christianity, where the speaker told about a boy who had disobeyed his parents by looking directly at an eclipse. Naturally, the boy went blind.

I was struck by the way the tale was used -- exactly as the 1950s morality stories were, with the parents knowing but not telling why the thing was dangerous. I was also sickened by the great relish my hyperfundamentalist sister showed in telling the story.

She also agreed with me in loathing the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, but she hated it because the title character was rewarded for disobeying her father. Apparently all she saw of Andersen's complex, heartbreaking story was a lesson in mindless obedience.

Movies for adult women seem to show the dangers of independence and physical action. Look at Thelma and Louise. They went on vacation without men. almost got raped, and ended up dead at the bottom on the Grand Canyon. Or Million-Dollar Baby, where a girl learns to box and ends up dead.

Re: Spoilers for Thelma & Louise and Million-Dollar Baby

[edanam.livejournal.com]

These kinds of "keep girls/kids safe" kind of morality tales were much more common in the late 40's through early 60's & were a reflection of the rather conservative era (a result of a couple of things -- that generation's rebellion from their parent's more liberal era -- the roaring 20's, and the militant fanaticism of the cold war).

The counterculture of the late 60's/early 70's, along with things like Title IX, finally started to have a balancing effect and we see fewer of them in general fiction (though they are still prevelent in religious storytelling).

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember a story by Charlotte Yonge in which the girls are so caught up in making a beautiful patchwork for their mother that they neglect to amuse their brothers, who are then debauched by the stableboy. It is, of course, the girls' fault.

So even their filial and pious industry (it was ecclesiastical needlework of some sort) is seen as artistic self-indulgence: their real duty lay in protecting the boys from their own baser instincts.

Charlotte Yonge had a great deal of intelligence, warmth, and even humor--her morality appalls me.

Nine

[wychwood]

Interesting post *g*. But I have to back green_knight up on one thing - Amanda isn't swimming in the pool when she gets injured, she decides to go and swim in the open sea, because she's too strong and powerful to have to listen to the teachers' rules for "ordinary" girls. I don't remember whether she's specifically told that it's dangerous (though I have a feeling that she was) and my copies are lent to someone else just at the moment, so I can't check *g*. But open sea swimming from the school was something that was explicitly forbidden for anyone at any time.

However, I also used to get annoyed by the assumption in these books that one should obey without questioning *g*. If you tell me the reason for a rule, I'll generally obey quite happily, but "because I said so" has never convinced me...

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Mallory towers for years and years but Irecall that *everyone* was told to never swim in the sea as the currents were treacherous and the rocks jagged. It was a part of the initial orientation I think. And I recall that another girl also tried to dissuade Amanda the first time she proposed the idea.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

My recollection (and I haven't read Malory Towers in years and years and years) is that the girl's sin in the sin of Pride (deliberate capital P). For she is proud of her strength and therefore ignores injunctions not to go swimming in the ocean. I can't remember if she was told not to, or not, but I remember vividly her humbled character change. She's so much nicer once she's not better than anybody else--and that's a very common theme, that punishment, especially of the poetic justice variety, makes you a better person. Also that less transgressive equals better, as for example Sally and Alicia as foils for Darryl.

Don't forget Darryl's temper making Sally's appendix burst in the first book.

Foreign girls (by which, of course, we mean French. Or possibly Spanish.) are exempted because they aren't expected to be proper human beings in the first place.

Interestingly, I remember a lot of girl jocks getting their various comeuppances in Blyton's books, but no girl geeks. Am I just repressing, or was she assuming that no one would want to be an intellectual anyway, so there was no need for the cautionary tale?

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

The worst fate was saved for this girl who was proud, and angry with her parents for sending her to Mallory towers instead of a more privileged private school. And she doesn't write, is rude when they visit, and then her fatehr dies and she has to leave to become a secretary. It is the only incident I recall where the damage/punishment was permanent, and wouldn;t get better with time.

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

Talking of Mallory towers reminds me of how Darrell was portrayed as a natural swimmer. And since she was the heroine, I assumed all heroines are natural swimmers. So there I was, all of 12 years old, The Heroine in my own life, and for the first time ever, studying in a school with a swimming pool.

My first swimming lesson, I climb up to the highest diving board, and jump down, supremely confident that my natual swimming abilities will surface when I'm in water. Would you believe it, they didn't! So I came up for air and felt myself go down again. The second time I bobbed up, my coach yelled and asked if I knew how to swim. I had time for a 'no' before I sank again....

I was summoned to the Principal's office and asked why I'd do such a thing. I explained the theory, and they laughed so hard I was let off without a punsihment. :)

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

I have been thinking about this, and realised that Russian folk tales actually work the other way round. Men/boys get into trouble, and it is always the women/girls who know what to do and when to get them out of trouble and enusre they don't get into fresh trouble.

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

the children are mocked and criticized by adults for not knowing how to do things which no one ever taught them, but when they ask adults to teach them, the adults mock and criticize them for that and tell them they are supposed to figure things out on their own without asking for help. When they figure it out wrong, they're mocked and critized; when they get it right, the adults are nice.

I was brought up somewhat like that: I was never told where any boundaries were, only punished when I crossed them. Made it very hard to be anything but over-cautious.

Of course, if I complained about having to guess, I was told "you don't have to guess; if you only thought, you'd know what's right!"

[littlerhymes]

Don't forget Seven Little Australians - feisty tomboy is crushed by tree whilst saving younger sibling!

Due to reading this and the Katy Dids and LM Montgomery and Little Women at an impressionable age, I had tended to associate all these together, i.e. coming of age drama in period costume, with the hand of god smiting the naughty at opportune times.

Just from personal experience I don't think this very direct linkage of deviance and punishment appears after the Victorian era. In C20th lit there seems to be more emphasis on reinforcing norms (e.g. Enid Blyton's sickly-sweet paragons), then punishing deviance.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I can't remember the title, but I had a YA (probably in the school library) about a boy who played with firecrackers with his friends and was blinded as a result. He had to relearn things, get a guide dog, etc. Not sure whether it was a true story or not. I think it was 1950's-era.

In Alcott's Jack and Jill Jack pretty much gets off scot-free.