The Orphan Perspective: A Critique of Education and Society

The Orphan Perspective: A Critique of Society and Education

 

How many classic children’s stories tell the story of an abandoned, orphaned or outcast child! There is Peter Pan, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Jane Eyre, Mary in The Secret Garden, Sara in The Little Princess, Anne of Greene Gables, Heidi, Louisa May Alcott’s Rose or Fanny, or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, to name only a few. Orphans are prevalent in folktales and fairy tales, in popular literature (Harry Potter), cartoons (Little Orphan Annie) and movies (Star Wars).  Why do orphans dominate children’s literature to such an extent? Recent comments on the subject suggest that the orphan’s deprivation, insecurity, and disempowerment show us how children struggle to grow and assert themselves. Philip Nel in his guide to Harry Potter wrote: “The literary orphan dramatizes the difficulty of being a child.” Melanie Kimball’s study of orphans in folktales and fiction (1999) supported this view: “Orphan characters in folktales and literature symbolize our isolation from one another and from society.”  In a recent commentary on Harry Potter, Lammermann (2000) tried to link the condition of being an orphan with the loss of connectedness characteristic of modern society. The understanding is that these are stories about coming to terms with life and power on one’s own.

Stories of orphans are not only focused on loneliness and self-assertion. The orphan also functions to present the reader with a stark outsider-perspective, and these narratives tell us a great deal about the world around the child, giving the reader insight into life in the schoolroom, life with parents, life for the powerless. The following notes suggest that our interest in the orphan is not only due to his isolation, poverty, and apparent personal autonomy, but also to the unique perspective of an autonomous mind on the world around the child. The orphan’s perspective in the context of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature threw light on a period of rapid industrialization and the shocking changes it brought about, including the rise of compulsory schooling, non-traditional approaches to medical practice, smaller, more isolated families and an indoor urban lifestyle.

The condition of being an orphan in stories of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (roughly 1865–1920) is marked by the fact that the father is often a marginal character, in part because his role as a provider has collapsed. In most of these narratives, the father is chronically absent, incapacitated or insolvent, as in Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and David Copperfield. In spite of counter-examples such as Rose’s Uncle Alec and Heidi’s grandfather, many of the fathers depicted are conflicted, suffering emotionally, and feel compelled to give their children over to the care of a school or housekeeper. Colin’s father in The Secret Garden tries to keep his son a secret. E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children opens dramatically at the moment the father has been thrown into prison. Disempowered men in fiction are not new. They are also familiar from fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Snow White, in which they indulge or ignore the cruel whims of the step-mother. The father’s inability to protect his helpless child or children from a female caregiver results in near catastrophe from which the children save themselves by the skin of their teeth, thanks to their own initiative, ingenuity, capacity for expressiveness and courage.

The mother or mother-substitute in these tales, as in so many fairy tales, is more central and takes the form of a wicked stepmother, housekeeper, head teacher, guardian, or governess. This maternal figure belittles and deprives the child, physically as well as emotionally. The pinched Miss Minchin, principal of Sara’s school in The Little Princess, is hostile, and Mrs. Reed, in the episodes of cruelty and neglect that open Jane Eyre, is resentful of Jane and behaves abusively towards her. The appropriately named Mrs. Medlock in The Secret Garden and the fearful Miss Rottenmeier in Klara’s home in Vienna seem to put their charges in the center of their attention, but clearly seem to hate them as well. Miss Rottenmeier and Miss Medlock, with the support of the doctor, assume that the children in their care won’t ever thrive, contributing perhaps to the children’s apparent inability to do so. Aunt Marilla (Anne of Greene Gables) and Aunt Miranda (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm) may care a good deal about their charges, but their behavior is often critical and impatient. The mother figure regulates indoor urban life with pettiness and cruelty, and the fear that something might be damaged or stolen lurks over everyone in these orderly households, including those of Anne’s Aunt Marilla (the amber necklace!) and Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally. Perhaps the predominance of the letter “M” in these names suggests we can interpret these women as horrific variations on the theme of motherhood.  No wonder the first chapters of Tom Sawyer and of Huck Finn emphasize the need for escape from the physical constraint of a world dominated by housekeeping, as Huck tells us, explaining why he “lit out:”

“Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways;”

As in Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, where many Aunts offer different life directions for poor Rose in a somewhat didactic and allegorical view of the female influence in the household, these stories show us the female influence as complex, sometimes caring and attentive on the one hand, but often oppressive on the other.

Indoor life involves the suppression of energy, and this in turn leads to illness. The illness of children, a frequent theme in 19th century fiction, appears in orphan stories as the culminating result of various forms of oppression and suppression.  This may take the form of a deep willingness to sacrifice, as in the case of Beth in Little Women.  She has a great musical gift, but Louisa May Alcott’s story implies that she is too willing to subordinate herself to the care of others, as in nursing the Hummel baby, who has scarlet fever, at Christmas. The struggle to survive in body and soul, the struggle for self-expression – the musical voice of Beth, of Phoebe, and of Rapunzel – together with the whole idea of sacrifice is at the core of these stories.  The four girls’ sacrifice of their Christmas money for the good of the poor and that of Jo’s hair, her pride and joy, to the war effort, prefigure the ultimate sacrifice of Beth herself. Of all the sisters, Beth most completely submerges herself in the care of others, and her death seems to be the consequence of this submission to duty.

Illness is also the narrative opportunity for a critique of the school system, as in Jane Eyre’s Lowell School, which suppressed and squandered the children’s vitality in part by neglecting their need for wholesome food and fresh air. At Lowell school, Jane’s friend, Helen died of consumption, due in part to the lack of sanitation, but also to a lack of autonomy for the spirit. Bronte’s Lowell school might be the Lowell textile mills in Massachusetts for all the deprivation its inmates endure. The schools in Dickens are also unhealthy, breeding divisiveness and petty cruelty. Dickens describes David Copperfield’s Salem House school in this way:

"I gazed upon the schoolroom into which he took me as the most forlorn and desolate place I had ever seen—a long room, with three long rows of desks and six of forms, and bristling all round with pegs for hats and slates. Scraps of old copy-books and exercises litter the dirty floor.”(Ch.5) 

Teachers and administrators discourage autonomy of intellect in a school setting dominated by “old copy books and exercises.”  Copperfield’s schoolmates humiliate him from the start of his school career, forcing him to wear a placard on his back that reads “Take care of him. He bites.” The bully Steerforth takes Copperfield’s money and slanders the only kind teacher, resulting in his dismissal. In this environment, bullying and cruel behavior goes unpunished. The dismal effects of schooling also appear in Hard Times in which the teacher Thomas Gradgrind favors the rule of fact over the imagination, signifying the suppression of autonomous thought. In adulthood Gradgrind’s own children turn out to have poor judgment, apparently a result of the suppressed drive for autonomy, whereas his adopted child, Sissie Jupe, survives emotionally. It’s important to realize that Sissie had proven hopelessly immune to instruction, which put her in a stronger position, emotionally. Offering an impoverished physical and emotional diet and crude methods of control, these schools were meant to show the horrors of a child’s forced march to adulthood. The authors of these narratives were not only writing about a child’s loneliness, poverty and isolation. They were also pointing to a situation of economic collapse, resulting in a father’s absence, a mother’s constraint, the deprivation of personal autonomy required by the school, and the cruel sacrifice involved with spiritual submission.

Poverty isn’t exactly the problem either, however. Poverty and the condition of being an orphan appear to provide the conditions in which a child can learn persistence and hard work, whereas in contrast the affluent children face a more serious kind of deprivation. The narrators portray affluent children as indulged, pampered and spoiled by excessive attention. The affluent children’s central position in the household deprives them of opportunities to serve and weakens their ability to take initiative and become autonomous themselves. As a result, affluent children look sick and the orphan looks healthy.

There are a couple of striking examples of this in David Copperfiel. Steerforth had always been the focus of his mother’s life. She absolved him of guilt for his own role in abusing others, and consequently the habit of abuse persists. His mother later on admits the tragic nature of her relationship with him, describing her son as “the object of my life, to whom its every thought has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish, from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth…” (218-Chapter 32). In this faustian pact of parenting, the mother indulges the whims of the child at the expense of his soul. The lurid Uriah Heep, the other of David Copperfield’s two villains, is even more dangerously entangled with his mother than Steerforth.  In both cases, the villain’s mother has stifled him by depriving him of the opportunities that autonomy would provide them, whereas the motherless David raises himself by his own bootstraps, his life grounded in ethical principles.

Indulged children in the books of this era are not always evil, but they are sometimes ill or aimless, passive and desperate. Examples include the lonely and wealthy Laurie in Little Women who never develops a strong sense of personal motivation, as well as Aunt Clara’s son in Eight Cousins, the handsome Charlie, who, like Steerforth is “wild”, and Colin in The Secret Garden, under the care of Miss Medlock and Dr. Craven. The landed upper-class household at Misselthwaite revolves around the needs of Colin, initially a physically incompetent child without independence, resourcefulness, or a sense of purpose. The struggles of Colin and Klara, in spite of the medical attention brought to bear on their cases, brings to mind the heroine’s unambiguous remarks about her husband, the doctor, in The Yellow Wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “John is a physician, and perhaps – (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) –perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.”  Gilman privately lets us know that she believes “congenial work, with excitement and change,” would do her good, but the windows in “this atrocious nursery” in the “ancestral halls” her husband has rented are “barred for little children” as for her. Medical diagnosis has often entailed the warning to avoid work, change, excitement, even writing, but these authors tell us that the lack of useful work, freedom and autonomy impedes the health and development of constrained children, as well as constrained women.

    Who are the true guides, helpers and teachers that foster the orphan child’s personal growth and development? The orphan child finds his true helper and model for ethical behavior in close association with the natural world, as in the case of Heidi’s grandfather, or Mary’s Dicken and Ben Weatherstaff’s robin redbreast, a bird that seemed to speak to Mary, telling her about the secret garden. As in fairy tales, these narratives link the natural with the supernatural, bearing out the magical relationship of effort and energy between love given and love returned, or the seeds of giving and the response of the universe. The Golden Age narratives of orphans also link work and effort with the magic of change and growth.

    Perhaps this relationship between effort and the natural, work and the supernatural, accounts for the fact that in orphan stories of achievement, the helper or teacher also belongs to a lower social class than the hero. For one example, Cousin Rose, in Louisa May Alcott’s somewhat moralistic Eight Cousins, has a maidservant, Phoebe, who proves to be her role model. Phoebe has learned to sacrifice her own interests with humility and without resentment, and she works hard and selflessly. Phoebe is an orphan, like Rose, but she has no aunts or uncles to occupy themselves with her development. She does have a beautiful singing voice, and this helps her carve out a sphere of her own. Rose later matures and marries her intellectual cousin, Max, but does not, either literally or metaphorically speaking, acquire a voice like her friend, Phoebe.

    In other orphan stories as well the abandoned child’s real teacher is often a servant. The Indian servant creates a bridge for Sara in The Little Princess between the poverty of her school existence and the wealth that changes her life and vindicates her as a human being. For Mary in The Secret Garden, the country boy Dicken, and his sister, the hard-working housemaid Martha, from a poor family of 12 children, show her a new way of looking at the world. The authors show us that Heidi’s friend Peter, the goatherd, his grandmother, and Heidi’s grandfather, who has returned from the excesses of urban life to a life of woodworking and farming, embody true values. Mrs. Reed’s young servant, Bessie Lee, who tends to Jane Eyre, is the only person in the child’s young life to treat her with affection, telling her stories, singing songs, providing good food. In David Copperfield, Peggoty, the young servant that tends David as a child, together with her family, provides David with support and a model for family strength, illustrating simplicity, honesty, deep humility, gratefulness and capacity for joy in the face of penury and tragedy. In other words, the lonely orphan usually finds his role models in the laboring class. The strongest influence on Tom Sawyer’s life is also the outcast, Huck Finn, and, in the most dynamic of all these examples of relationships spanning social classes, Huck Finn’s real teacher is Jim, a slave in ante-bellum Missouri. Huck learns more from this relationship than from his violent father or from school, or the Widow Douglas or Judge Thatcher. For example, Jim takes a “hair ball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox and he used to do magic with it,” and eloquently tells Huck’s “whole fortune” (Chapter 4). Jim’s friendship is unique in Huck’s life, providing Huck with the opportunity for the growth in moral character that is at the center of the book.

    In addition to friendship, the health of the child appears to be the result of independence and resourcefulness. Heidi learns compassion and persistence from the care and feeding of a number of intractable goats, and Mary’s work clearing the ground for the green shoots introduces her to the cycle of life, teaching her the effort it takes to grow. The strong child contributes to the common good. Heidi, Dicken, eventually Mary, and Rebecca, unlike her mother and Aunt Miranda, are exuberantly healthy and willing to work. Health is closely linked with agricultural work, and ill-health is associated with an indoor and urban lifestyle. Health is the result of inner strength, entailing stubbornness and resistance to the unnatural order of things with which our heroes and heroines are in conflict. Within these books, the unnatural order of things is manifested in school and medical practice as well as in the absurdity of a ferocious house-keeping, appearing in such details as the thread Tom’s Aunt Polly uses to sew the boys’ shirts so they won’t go swimming. These petty details manifest the absurdity of arbitrary coercion and demonstrate the way constraint and suppression of energy works. No wonder Huck ends his story telling the readers: “But I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

    Orphan children are marginalized and impoverished, but their lack of parents, lack of schooling and lack of medical care enables the author to contrast their condition with that of wealthy children who are at the center of the lives of their caregivers, subject to the petty tyranny of the household, lacking meaningful employment, apparently dependent and stifled by privilege and the subtlest forms of coercion. Sickness and paralysis of the limbs become the symbolic expression of their incapacity for initiative. The focus of these Golden Age books on the paralysis of children such as Klara (Heidi) and Colin (The Secret Garden) suggests that these are not only rags-to-riches stories about personal empowerment, or cases of exemplary children faced with hardships, but also adult books taking issue with the culture of a rapidly industrializing society as it disabled children and by implication, adults as well. Charlotte Perkins Gilman later sent a copy of The Yellow Wallpaper to the physician who had prescribed that she never pick up a pen in her life; she reported in a 1913 comment that while he never responded he did change his prescription for neurasthenia as a result of reading it.

    Dickens and Twain have been accused of didacticism and propaganda, and moralism can be seen in Alcott, Wiggins, and Spyri, but these narrators all created an autonomous orphan child whose life served as a direct attack on public education, new forms of medical practice, urban life, and the compulsory suppression of imagination and autonomy apparently designed to ready children for life and work in an industrial society. The orphan linked urbanization didactically linked with moral depravity, dis-ability being the result of social conditions that suppressed the vitality and energy of the child and denied her a voice. In these books the recovery of a child’s health became the dramatic means of embodying the values of pre-industrial life in which children, spiritually connected with the earth, could find an autonomous voice, and prove able to heal themselves. The orphan perspective of the late 19th century, as far as it is from our world, can still remind us of our own aspirations.

 

Works Cited

 

Donahue, Deirdre. (2003, July 2). Orphans in literature empower children. USA Today. Retrieved February 24, 2007 from http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/2003-07-02-bchat_x.htm

          Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. (1899). The Yellow Wallpaper. An Autobiography of Emotions.

          Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. (1913). Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper.

Kimball, M. (1999, January 1). From folktales to fiction: Orphan characters in children’s literature. Library Trends. Retrieved February 24, 2007 from http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1387/is_3_47/ai_54836352

Lammermann, E. (2000, December 6). Harry Potter and the anomie within. Dorkk. Retrieved February 24, 2007

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Posted at Saturday, March 8, 2008 10:45 AM
• In Education & Children Category | Permalink